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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   594 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 16, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Including notes, my novel series is now 248k words long. Officially approaching the midpoint of book 2. Reception has been really good. I'm now ranked 88/~100k on Royal Road's best rated all time, and I'm steadily picking up readers. Hoping that the readership growth continues and eventually translates to more patreon income, I'm still only pulling a couple hundred a month, but I'm optimistic about the long term trajectory of the story. If nothing else, I have already one novel that I'll be proud to publish and feel is worth charging money for whenever I finally decide to pull the trigger on stubbing.

Not much to report, been refactoring as per last week. I think it will have some pretty cool cnsequences, like simplifying the import code, but I actually have to get there first.

Anything on your side @Southkraut?

Not much.

I opened up a new repository for non-code. My plan is to collect all my various design documents, notes, redundant notes, doubly-redundant notes, diagrams, drawings, concepts etc. in one place instead of having them spread over multiple other repositories, cloud storage services, hard drives etc. I have gotten as far as...opening the new repository. Yeah.

Other than that, I managed to find a flaw in my Unreal code that caused some of my woes, fixed it, and discovered that this still left more than enough problems for things to decidedly not work. Needs another round of investigation.

Welp, I guess I have a project car now.

The friend of mine who recently passed away left me his car. It's nicer than my car on paper (nine years newer and with 90K miles whereas mine is pushing 250K), but I didn't love it when I owned it, and while mechanically sound enough it is beat to hell with loads of stupid body damage, and the interior is trashed (In my friend's defense, one of the things I hated about the car is that it has a white leather interior that looked great when new but is extremely difficult to keep clean, and the grade of "leather" Mazda used isn't winning any points in my book for durability.).

I'm in the middle of a bare-minimum cleanup (The driver's seat is hopeless and the back seat is rough, but the rest came out fairly well and leather conditioner smells much nicer than stale dog.), and working on a to-do list. I'm not sure what I want to do with it but, keep it or sell it, this pig is need of some lipstick.

In terms of relatively low-budget fixes, I need to do the following:

  • Fix the rear bumper/replace the broken tail light. I'm fairly confident that the huge dent can be popped out if the bumper cover is removed, and you have to remove the tail lights to remove the bumper cover, so I've ordered the tail light.

  • Replace the cabin air filter. I did this when I first bought the car from a chain smoker, but holy crap that was 7 years ago. Part ordered, and my fun observation is that cigarette smoke is easier to clean up than dog hair (It was a shorthaired dog.).

  • Comprehensively finish removing the mud from when the car was driven into a sinkhole. Time consuming, but free.

  • Repair the touch screen. Mazda touch screens are notorious for the digitizer cracking/delaminating and causing issues (namely, ghost touches that cause the radio to go crazy), but a knockoff replacement is cheap and the job doesn't look that hard. I've ordered the part.

  • Rotate the two good tires to one axle, get two new tires, and an alignment. Hopefully nothing in the front end is broken, but the absence of clunking is an encouraging sign.

  • The front brake rotors are warped enough to be irritating and are likely too worn to be turned, but hey the rotors are cheap on Rock Auto. The brake fluid also needs to be flushed because the brakes are even mushier than I remember them being. Low priority.

  • The Y-pipe/rear muffler either needs to bent back into shape or replaced such that it sits in the hangers correctly and doesn't squeak over bumps.

  • The driver's side door seal needs to be replaced because it is torn and makes for some annoying road noise.

  • The LED headlights need to be removed and replaced with the stock halogens. Those were bright enough and the fans for the LEDs make an annoying humming noise.

Things I am unlikely to fix:

  • The big scrape on the bottom/side of the car. You almost have to look for it and this would require real repair work.

  • The driver side door skin is damaged from where the fender was smashed into it. I replaced the fender to fix that because it was surprisingly cheap to buy a whole new painted fender, but a whole new door skin is not cheap, and again it's another one of those things where you kind of have to look for the damage.

  • Almost all of the undercarriage plastic is missing. Added together, that's a few hundred bucks worth of plastic, I never noticed a difference in fuel economy or road noise to justify it, and why would I pay to make changing the oil harder?

  • The front bumper has its share of scrapes, but fuck it it's an eight year old car. It doesn't have to be perfect, just not look like and feel shit.

Final chair update. When last we left I had rushed ahead getting one chair glued up, with 15 pieces left to shellac and wax.

The last three chairs were uneventful. I changed my process slightly, to allow the wax to cure for 24 hours before clamps, and then I only left the clamps on for 1 hour. This prevented the finish from being damaged at all. My daughter had a great time handing me rags, and helping to wipe off the squeeze out. The few places we missed just pealed right off the waxed finish after they had dried. So yay! Then she helped screw the seat bottoms on which she also enjoyed.

Final shot of all 4 completed chairs, as well as them around my already cluttered table. Space Empires 4X: All Good Things finally showed up, you'll have to forgive me. I was able to give them a solid test spin on Saturday, playing another game of Hands in the Sea. I was barely cognizant I was sitting in anything, which is always the sign of a comfortable chair, which was the last thing I was concerned about. Who wants to spend 6 months making a set of chairs only to realize they aren't comfortable to sit in for a prolonged period of time?

Complete album of the project for those interested.

This project was definitely a marathon that tested my ability to stay motivated. But something about having a shop that only has room for one project, as well as having dumped some cash money into the lumber for it made it the sort of thing I felt obligated to finish, come hell or high water.

Wow, those are gorgeous.

I'm no carpenter, but I must say those chairs look solid. Good work!

These are some very nice chairs!

How many games of Twilight Struggle have you played?

Hmmm, I think 10-ish?

Very nice. Are you a cross-stretchers-for-legs sceptic? I have no position, just curious.

I finished my headphones, they turned out surprisingly okay. Not great, could certainly make a better and quicker job if I did it again, but more than serviceable enough to not want to do a better job and better than I had any reason to expect given it was my first attempt at an experiment made with leftovers. Unfortunately I've lost all my photos after my phone decided that booting up was no longer to its tastes.

Very nice. Are you a cross-stretchers-for-legs sceptic? I have no position, just curious.

Well, there weren't any in the plans I used as a base, so I didn't add any. But also none of the chairs in my house have any, and they've held up fine over the years. My intuition is that with the seat back being so stiff, and also the fact that people generally scoot chairs forward and backwards, not side to side, cross stretchers didn't seem necessary. But I suppose should I ever discover I'm wrong, I can probably hack them in. Probably just cave and use a pocket hole screws.

Unfortunately I've lost all my photos after my phone decided that booting up was no longer to its tastes.

That's too bad. Can still share a pic of the finished product. They sound cool.

Congrats on finishing the chairs, they look super nice!

The Protomen fan

Unfathomably cultured.

Third draft of NaNoWriMo project is essentially done. I'm sick of looking at it and thinking about it. I will have to try to do neither.

I'm happy to help you run an edit pass if you're still looking!

Sent you a DM.

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