Creepy Guy by the Water Cooler

You know that creepy guy at work that is always hanging out by the water cooler? Well, I have been working from home quite a bit, and I have a water cooler. By default, that made me the creepy guy by the water cooler. Notice, I said “made” and not “makes”. I have the problem solved! Now there is the pictured creepster to take my place.

I also always wanted an aquarium. However, I didn’t want to worry about keeping up with it, figuring out what kinds of fish get along, deciding on salt water vs fresh water… you get the point. Now there is no need. I have a maintenance free aquarium!

All joking aside, it is always fun to play around with paint. What started as a face drawn with a Sharpie turned into various attempts with paint. If you want to play around with this, I have a few suggestions:

  • Roughen the surface: the aquarium jug images rubbed off fairly easily when transported for refill, so I lightly sanded next jug and it was much more durable.
  • Acrylic paint seems to work fine. I used the cheap acrylic paint from Wal-Mart.
  • If you are going to look through the jug at the painted images, be sure to think it out and paint in reverse order. For instance, paint the things that will be in the foreground before the things in the background.
  • On the fish tank, my wonderful wife had the idea of drawing the outline of everything in black and then filling in the color. I think it turned out great that way. You don’t even have to be careful to keep inside of the outlines because you won’t be able to see it!

This wasn’t the most intricate DIY project in the world, but I thought it was fun and added some color to the pantry. I can’t wait until I break one of these jugs so we can paint another!

If you try it, you can celebrate with some good old fashioned fire water when you finish!

Chicken Feeder and Precrastination

In some of my previous posts (Chicken Coop Automation 1 and Chicken Coop Automation Part 2 ), I mentioned preemptive laziness and how it relates to my chicken habit. After reading those posts, my wife coined a new word: precrastination. I liked the term, and I defined it to mean doing a task ahead of time to allow more free time in the future. It turns out precrastination is a real psychological term, and its real definition is performing a task before it is beneficial or optimal to do so. I just can’t win. I guess I need to procrastinate my precrastination to reach an optimal state of crastination.

Regardless, I think I crastinated this chicken feeder just right. The idea actually came from the internet of googles, but it works very well so I thought I’d pass it on.

Originally I had a traditional chicken feeder that fed the ground better than it fed the chickens. I would fill it up with a couple pounds of feed, and most of it would end up on the ground the next day. This didn’t align with my laissez faire chicken policy.

Some research provided some exotic and elaborate feeding systems that had been created: from electronic rationing systems to screw drive feeders with an auger. While I am a firm believer in over engineering and Rube Goldberg devices, I didn’t want to deal with the calibration, sensors, programming, and expense for this particular project. I did some more research and discovered that I could make a very simple feeder with some advanced engineering materials: hot glue, a bucket, and some PVC… pretty much all of the good stuff minus duct tape and zip ties.

The feeder is pretty basic and shouldn’t require much explanation.

  • Get bucket.
  • Get PVC elbow
  • Get hot glue gun
  • Cut hole in bucket
  • Trim one end of PVC elbow
  • Hot glue PVC elbow in hole

Right now, I have one of these made from a square bucket and two made from round buckets. Rather than putting feed in a couple pounds at a time and having it trampled into the ground, I fill up all three about once a month with 50# of pellet feed and have virtually no waste.

The only variable I’ve played with is the height of the internal mouth of the PVC above the floor of the bucket:

  • 1/2″: too low, and the feed does not feed very well
  • 1″: the feed feeds fairly freely
  • 1 1/2″: (.125 feet) feed feeds forth flawlessly forming a fully functional first-rate fowl feeder

I would also like to note the importance of using feed pellets rather than crumbles. Crumbles muck up the whole works.

The neat thing about this project is that more time is spent driving to the store and buying the components than actually building the feeder!