Kurt Leucht’s Blog

I did this weekend project a long long time ago, but just recently cleaned out my messy garage, got the Ranger back in and finally took some photos of the project.

I built a pool lift for the toddler swimming pool. This pool is too big to deflate and blow up every other day or even every other week, so we keep it inflated all the time. But we had no place to store it when it was fully inflated. So I built the pool lift.

It has pulleys and a block-and-tackle and you just tie the rope off at the wall anchors. I tried it without the b&t, and it was way too hard to lift. It’s light as a feather with the b&t, though. My wife gets the pool down all the time while I’m at work and puts it back up. When the kids outgrow the toddler pool I can think of all kinds of things that I can store up there.

One word of warning, though: the bottoms of your garage ceiling joists are not designed to hold the weight of heavy objects! Attic joists are designed to carry a heavy roof load only on the topmost spans. The lower spans are only designed for compression or tension.

Kurt

A few years ago my dad transferred some of my grandfather’s old silent films that he and his friends from the Peoria Cinema Club had made from the original edited films onto VHS format. I recently transferred them onto DVD and then stumbled across a website called CreateSpace where you can publish and sell your own DVDs. They do a nice job of printing the packaging and also printing onto the DVD itself, and they also set you up a store to sell your DVD. They even let you upload a 30 second trailer that they stream to potential customers. That’s a nice touch.

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So if you’re interested in watching some historic 1950’s Peoria Cinema Club films, just go to the below link and order yourself a copy. It will only cost you $9.50 plus shipping. What a bargain! https://www.createspace.com/243975

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2/17/2008 Addendum: As if CreateSpace wasn’t cool enough, they are also affiliated with Amazon, one of the largest online stores in the world! So you can buy this 1950’s Peoria Cinema Club DVD from either the CreateSpace store linked above or you can purchase it from Amazon.com! (http://www.amazon.com/1950s-Peoria-Cinema-Club-Films/dp/B0013TPGE2/)

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According to recent website statistics, my Yard Shed Plans web page (http://www.leucht.com/kurt/shed/) is pretty much the most popular web page on my whole website. This is very cool to me because this is exactly the sort of content that I had most hoped to be able to provide with this website back in the late 90’s when I first created it. Sadly, that Yard Shed Plans page never even got completely finished. Mostly because the 3D models and images were difficult and time consuming to create. Also because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, which makes them even more time consuming to make.

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So busy-ness has kept me from finishing that particular page and also it has kept me from providing more content like this on my site. But the invention of the blog in the past few years (and my subsequent use of it here) has allowed me to quickly and easily create simple web pages, or blog posts, about even the most simple and small projects. So far the traffic on my blog is no where near the amount of traffic on the Yard Shed Plans page, though. Maybe most people that find my Yard Shed Plans page are searching specifically for “plans”. And it’s hard work and time consuming to put together actual “plans” for a project. So maybe I’ll have to go back and add “plans” to all my other projects that are on this site. In my spare time, of course.
Kurt

I found this really cool website called CafePress.com. It’s a site that lets you set up your own store with your own merchandise. You upload your own designs to be professionally printed on said merchandise and let people buy the stuff! Very cool. I threw together a quick Leucht.com T-Shirt design in about 5 minutes and it is now on sale for under 10 bucks. I designed some other stuff too.

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You can let people purchase the stuff at cost, or you can actually mark up the merchandise and make a little bit of cash in the process. This is a very cool idea. Check out the official Leucht.com online store now!

After not finding any kid furniture that we were completely happy with, I decided to design and create my own large rolling toybox and plastic-bin holding shelf that can turn into a desk as the kids grow up. If I can find some time, I might add some detailed plans for this project. But for now I’ll just post a couple of photos of the finished products.

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Leave a comment below or send me an email from the link at the very bottom of the website if you are interested in seeing some plans.

Kurt

A few years ago on my 15 year old concrete block house, one of my exterior window sills started cracking severely and eventually started falling off in large chunks. We had new windows installed, and that work basically did the old broken window sill in for good. I decided to try to form a new concrete window sill on my own. You can see in the photo below that the missing window sill and the broken pieces on the ground after I had ripped off all the loose pieces.

In the photo below, you can clearly see the rebar showing throughout the length of the fractured concrete surface. I guess that rebar didn’t help the sill stay in one piece. It actually helped break it apart once the crack had formed in the area of the rebar.

I got the surface really clean and free of dust and conrete pieces. Then I painted on concrete adhesive that I bought at my local home improvement store. I’ve never used this stuff before, so I don’t know how well it works. As you can see from the photo below, I then mounted some wood strips that were about a half an inch thick to the wall with tapcon screws. These wood strips would become the bottom and side surfaces for my concrete sill mold.

Then I screwed a 1×6 plank that I had laying around to the wood strips. I mounted the top of the plank at the same height that I wanted the top of the new window sill to end up being. I then mixed up some concrete and poured it into the mold. I made sure that the top surface of the new sill slanted down and away from the house. Otherwise, water would pool instead of running off. The photo below shows the mold filled with concrete and curing with plastic around it.

The new sill is perfect. Eventually I got the house painted and the photo below shows the final painted product.

Kurt

This was another case of seeing a product in a mail-order catalog and saying to myself, “I could make that, and it would cost me way less than 40 bucks!”

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I don’t really have a lot of details to talk about here. I saw this product, probably in an expensive Pottery Barn catalog or something. It was not a big deal to make. I just cut some boards to size, made rabbit joints and finish nailed them together. I put lots of coats of dark stain on it to get it as dark as I wanted it. I wish I would have made it about an inch wider, though. When we put magazines in it, they get rolled up at the bottom corner because the slot width gets skinnier at the bottom.

I saw this product in a magazine somewhere and thought, “Hey, I can make that!”

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So I did. I bought a plank of cheap pine board and cut out all the shapes and screwed them all together. The painting was the hardest part, and even that wasn’t too difficult.

Kurt

My stepdad is a professional welder. And one of the presents he gave me for Christmas 2004 was a heavy-duty custom wall-mounted plywood storage rack. It is deep enough to hold all of my hurricane plywood that I use to cover my windows. It’s a very nice design and I hope that some company out there will start selling these in your local home improvement store … at least in the Southeast US.

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This is a placeholder for me to come back later and add detailed dimensions!!!!!!!

Kurt