Suddenly, here we are, 2021! And what a hideous year 2020 was what with coronavirus, insane politics both sides of the Atlantic, a climate emergency and a world turned upside down. I could use all that as an excuse for seemingly abandoning Planet Keef, but that would be too easy. I was actually very busy in the shed in 2020 and started many projects. I just didn't manage to finish any of them as videos. Here's a little rundown of some of the videos that I started but haven't (yet) finished. A SMALL LED VIDEO LIGHT This was intended to be a quick and easy project using an Anglepoise desk lamp as the adjustable stand with a square biscuit tin fixed on as a reflector. My plan was to stuff 10 metres of LED strip inside this, and then cover the front of the tin with some kind of diffusing material. Unfortunately I only got as far as removing the old light and its shade from the stand. I wanted to 3D print a bracket to connect the tin to the stand, but the printer was out of act...

Assembling the Rage 3S Until a few months before I bought this machine, I had no idea that such things as sliding mitre saws existed. Sure, I'd seen them in DIY stores, but had no idea what they were, and still less idea that I needed one. But after trying to make a picture frame with mitred corners I started looking for decent mitre blocks, and I had a distant memory of using a hand operated mitre saw in woodwork classes at school. Searching online for those things threw up results for lots of Sliding Mitre Saws and I realised that was exactly what I needed. The Evolution Rage 3-S seemed to be a good bet for me. It was a great price, about £100 from Screwfix, but there's always the possibility that something so cheap will be badly made and unreliable. And although it's made in China (isn't everything these days?), it's designed in the UK and it had great reviews on various websites I looked at. So I bought one. Cutting wood The machine comes in a bi...

I only came across this recently -  a very simple and cheap way to make your own wood stain. All you do is pop a chunk of fine wire wool into a jar, top it up with the vinegar of your choice, give it a shake then unscrew the lid a little to let the gases escape. After about two days, remove the wire wool, filter your stain through some kitchen paper, and that's your wood stain ready to use. Now, the colour you get depends to some extent on the type of vinegar you used and on the amount of tannin in the wood you want to stain. In the video of this, I made up small jars of stain using white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, white (distilled) vinegar, red wine, malt and balsamic vinegars. Then I tested them all on oak, softwood, ordinary plywood, MDF, and an unidentified plywood that I made my workbench top out of (the top and bottom skins are kind of reddish). The results on the oak, which has a lot of tannin, were amazing. They were solid black, blueish-black, and a range of greys....

We bought our son a beautiful print for Christmas, but not a frame. Maybe we thought we already had a frame we could re-use, I can't remember. But I do remember being in the man-cave, looking at a pile of gorgeous engineered oak flooring I'd got from Freecycle and wondering what amazing things I could do with it. I couldn't do anything as amazing as using it as actual flooring in even the smallest room because there's only 1.5 square metres of it. Inspiration struck and I decided to make a picture frame. I had about 5 days (actually, a couple of hours each day) before we were due to drive down to That London to deliver it, which I thought should be plenty of time. As it turned out, it was a close-run thing. My first attempt involved mitred corners, but I have neither the skill nor the tools to cut them accurately. I worked on it for 2 days before I abandoned it. The second attempt was much more successful, involving full-height stiles. Here's the video of me ...