Wood footbridge part two!

We picked up the lumber from home depot and ended up getting some redwood in place of treated as it would look better and last longer. For the arced boards we used 2"x12"x96" boards and traced the curve with PVC screwed into the two corners and top middle. Cutting it was pretty difficult and tried a few different tools before settling upon the jigsaw to do all the cutting, even at that each board took about 30 minutes to cut. In the original design, I had five supporting arced boards total but decided upon only doing three, it would still be very structurally sound and would require much less work. 

The assembly of it was quite easy, and I'm thrilled I spent extra time on the design to figure out how the thing would fit and screw together. I did several dry fittings of the bridge before screwing everything together, and it paid off, it turns out the arced boards where each slightly different and the top planks wouldn't sit flat on their surface. We were able to solve this issue by taking an electric hand planer to the three boards clamped together.

I also miscalculated the width of the 2"x12"'s width and ended up having to trim some of the inner cross-boards to fit correctly. 

After that, we cut the top planks for the bridge. We found that home depot had some more beautiful 12" boards, so we got those and just ripped them down the middle to get 6" planks. We pre-drilled the holes on the top boards to ensure they all had the same screw spacing, and with the help of my brother, we put it all together. I also dug out spots on either side of the creek for the two ends of the bridge to fit into the ground and top face of the bridge to meet up with the stepping stones. 

We built it outside of its final resting spot so it could be removed later for staining. We would order the chain online as the local stores didn't have what we were looking for, as well as caps for the 4x4's. Overall I am thrilled with how it turned out and was an exciting challenge!

Since the Coronavirus left many people at home with not a lot to do, many people have been doing home improvement projects; and so some friends down south are doing the same. 

One of the things they wanted to add to their property was a small wooden footbridge over a small dry creekbed; and asked if I would be willing to design something up in Fusion360. The creek was approximately 6ft across, and they wanted the bridge to span a bit longer to have it fit better with the surrounding. The width of the footbridge was to be 3ft wide with an arced.

@josiah and I spent a bit of time looking online at designs to figure out exactly what would look best and how to build it. After coming up with a couple of different designs, we settled upon one that would have four 4"x4" posts in the corners of the bridge with long structural beams that go across the creek. 

The main issue we ran into pretty quickly was how do we get a curve on the supporting boards. I did a quick google search to find out what other people have done and found an informational video tutorial. They used conduit (plastic tubing) and attached the two bottom corners of it to a 2"x12"x96" piece of wood, then the middle was screwed into the center top of the board; you would then trace the curve and cut it with a circular or jigsaw. To ensure you had consistent curves, you would then take that board and trace it onto others. 

For the top planks, we found some 1"x6"x48" lumber at home depot that would work great for this. Since the bridge has an arc in it I figured we would space the boards out by 1/8" to make it look as if the gaps were planned and not since we don't have the tools to get chamfered edges.

Since neither of us had all that much experience, we wanted to keep the design relatively simple and straightforward, so we spent extra time figuring out exactly how it would all fit together. Which is why we are going to use a chain as the guardrail, it wouldn't provide any actual support if you were to fall but more for aesthetics.

I completely forgot that the wood we would be using isn't its actual size like 2"x4" boards are actually 1.5"x3.5", so I spent another couple hours making changes to the design to accommodate for that so we wouldn't run into issues when building it. 

I then took the design into the drawing section of Fusion360 and deconstructed it and took the board shapes and figured out the quantity we would need of each one as well as how much stock we should buy for the project. I'll be going down this weekend to work on it and will post an update after. 

My parents wanted to get back into gardening again and wanted me to make a raised garden bed help with growing and to keep good soil from getting mixed in with the dead dirt of where we live. 

I looked around online for what other people did first and then came up with the design. I would have the legs and cross beams be out of 4"x4"s and the structural bit between those out of 2"x4"s. I wanted the bottom base of the bed to be sloped into the center to drain water. I would then place chicken wire along the walls and floor of the garden to give it more integrity, so the dirt isn't putting so much pressure on the corners of the wood. I then would use a black plastic sheet and cover the chicken wire to prevent the wood from molding and having to be replaced as soon. 

Once I was pleased with the design, I took it into the drawing section of Fusion360 and made some plans I could follow while building it. It's especially helpful to put it in a drawing format because it saves so much time from trying to problem solve on the go and potentially make more mistake cuts. I also had an angled board, which I've never done in a project before, so I was able to find the angle very quickly at a glance at my project.

I did have to make some modifications to the garden box on the fly to save on time and money, so the outcome was somewhat different than the design. I was also able to take advantage of using new wall siding we had to lie around for the walls of the bed. 

Since Oneshop is closing down, I needed to find a new space to put the Pocket NC and settled upon the home garage. It was mostly empty, and other family members didn't frequent it too often, so it was the ideal choice. I only had a couple of white folding tables in there previously, so I decided to build a workbench to have a more solid workspace. I still had access to Oneshop which wouldn't be closing for a while yet so I wanted to do the project there.

I liked the design my grandfather used to build him, so I recreated it in Fusion360 and modified it to my liking. I did do some research online to see what other people did for making worktables, and for the most part, they all followed the same general design using 2x4's for the support and plywood for the top.

I had some extra time to play around with the design, so I went over to the drawing section of Fusion to make some basic plans I could follow when building it with measurements and diagrams showing how it all fitted together. I was already somewhat familiar with how the projects should look to minimize any repetition.

I used 1/2" plywood I found lying around at Oneshop and used that for the top of the worktable. For the legs, I had initially designed it to use 4x4" boards, but lowes didn't have any readily available when I went in, so I decided to double up on 2x4" instead. The whole process only took me about 4 hours to assemble, including some sanding. All in all, the entire project only cost me about $40 to build, which I am delighted as other tutorial videos I've seen fall around $100.