Making a Super Simple Planer Knife Sharpener

 

Last week, I talked about my neverending frustration in keeping the blades on my surface planer nice and sharp, which was creating a situation where my favorite tool was quickly becoming my most hated tool. 

After searching in vain for an off-the-shelf sharpener, I quickly came to the realization that I needed to make my own tool if I ever wanted to sharpen my knives.  Thankfully, I found out online that many people had the same issue that I had, and I was able to find many tutorials on how to build a jig that should make sharpening knives quick and easy. 

I found that everyone had their own special approach to building their jigs, all with varying degrees of complexity. Most jigs were designed so that they would be able to handle a variety of different-sized planer knives, so often they had built-in locking features that locked the knives in place as you sharpened them. 

In my own particular case, I am always going to use the same size knife in my planer, so I didn't really need to have a jig that needed to accommodate different blade types, which meant that my jig should be fairly simple to build.  

The Bane of My Existance

 

Well perhaps that's a bit too strong, but I do have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my planer. 

I love how quickly and easily it levels out wooden boards to make them nicely flat and perfect, saving me many hours of sanding. That is until the knives on my planer start getting dull. 

Wrapping up the Tweeting Weather Station - 3D Printing a Stevenson Screen

 Now that I had all the pieces of the weather station now all put together and tweeting out the weather conditions inside of my home, it was pretty neat to see in action, but alas, not very useful. In order for the station to be truly useful, I really needed to have the sensors outside of the house.

The issue with anything electronic is that they don't really take exposure to the outside elements very well, however having them sealed inside a box won't provide any accurate readings. The solution is to have the sensors housed in some sort of container that will permit the entry of the outside air in order to get the most accurate temperature and humidity readings, but prevent nasty stuff like rain and snow from getting inside. 

Building a Tweeting Weather Station - Hooking Things up to Twitter with Python

 

Last week I put together a fairly simple weather station that gathered the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure and stored the data that the station was gathering into a text file.

The ultimate goal in all of this was to have the data from the weather station end up being fed to Twitter so that I can see what the weather conditions like at home from almost anywhere. 

To do this required doing a little bit of magic involving using some Python code to create a bot to feed my data and setting up an API on a Twitter account to allow Twitter to talk to the bot.