hello there tested friends and fellow makers it's your old buddy bill duran here in my basement shop
at punish props academy uh with my favorite things of the year and the first one if you can't tell by
my outfit is ghostbusters all of it the old movies the new movies especially the new one that just
came out uh especially because i got to go see it in theaters it was my first theater experience in
about two years and i dressed up i've got a whole outfit we had a bunch of friends that
had their outfits proton packs included i have my own proton pack we built a couple years ago
and this was my first chance to really wear it out into the world and field test that particle
accelerator and it went great uh we've got a ton of ghostbusters projects we've done on our channel
and uh recently i made some ecto goggles these are quickly becoming my favorite thing i've ever made
and one of the things that was so exciting about these was all the lathe work all the
knobs and lens casings were all done on this tiny little lathe here behind me so this lathe is also
one of my very favorite things now it isn't new i've had it for a couple of years but it's really
gotten a lot more use uh in the last few months including of course doing all the work here on the
ecto goggles normal lathe turning using aluminum but also some knurling and i do love me some knurl
so i've got a straight knurling bit here tool that we used on some of the knobs on the ectogoggles
and then to really fancy things up i got a diamond knurling tool to do some of the other knobs
on here it's a little finicky a little tricky to figure out how to use but the result is so
satisfying so this lathe has been getting a lot of use and then putting knurls on absolutely
everything i can get my hands on another project that we use the lathe for is my lightsaber i
made a highlander lightsaber this is actually a screen used mold for this handle from highlander 2
so it's super authentic and i turned it into a lightsaber and it makes me very happy
a lot of this was done on the cnc but also a lot of the more manual stuff i did on this here tiny
lathe and this isn't anything fancy this lathe i got it used um i want to say it was like four or
five hundred bucks and it came with a bunch of the tools i would need to do pretty much everything
i have of course purchased new stuff since getting it including these knurling tools
but as a beginner lathe and intro to turning things out of metal it's been fabulous now
someday i will get a big boy lathe when i have the space for it and the need for it but until then
all the small prop projects that i use this thing has been an absolute champ
and i love it one of my other favorite things this year has been these card scrapers and this
was a tip from our buddy ben edie you all know and love ben because he's a swell dude
over on his youtube channel he recommended using card scrapers usually for woodworking
he recommended using them on 3d prints and i've started using them usually on that first pass
where you're really knocking off the um the layer lines from an fdm print and i did that
on my ecto goggles the main body of that was 3d printed couldn't find one of the uh legitimate
night vision goggles fortunately the internet is awash with uh ecto goggle 3d files so i 3d printed
it they use these card scrapers to do the first pass of smoothing on those prints and they work
really fast for removing that those high spots i did of course go back in with sand paper to
do all the refining but these got me there a lot faster and they're quickly becoming a regular tool
in my kit speaking of tools in my kit we've set up our basement shop here recently we moved back into
here uh after a three year stint in a big old shop and part of um redoing our basement shop
here meant sort of making our studio space work perfectly for us and i have a little console where
i keep all the tools i use regularly including things like a heat gun and a hair dryer and a hot
glue gun now all of these tools have a tendency to trip the circuit breaker in our basement so
i got cordless versions of all of those i've got this little hair dryer here
uh just a cheap purchase on amazon now it doesn't have a heating element it doesn't heat up but
it pushes out air really nicely and i use it to dry paint when i'm in a hurry or dry
contact cement and so far it's worked for me really well one of the other things i grabbed
was this cordless heat gun uh this is amazing the heat gun is the main offender when it comes
to tripping the circuit breaker down here so replacing that with a cordless version
is fantastic i also love that it has a heavy base so that i can turn it on it'll stay on
and i can set it down on a table and use both my hands to hold something in front of the heat
it's a really cool sort of i've never heard of this brand before but it seems to work just
fine and another cheap amazon purchase so i like that one a lot i really like
this glue gun this was sent to us from our friends over at shurebonder over at punish props we've
worked with them in the past so this was sent uh free of charge so thank you sure bonder and uh
it's amazing it's similar to the heat gun there it's got a heavy base that it can stand up on uh
it heats up in about a minute you just turn it on a minute later you're ready to go with hot glue
and again a really great addition to that console where i have all the tools that i use
all the time and this one gets a ton of use now in the last year or so i've dove back into one
of my very favorite hobbies photography still photography uh we do a lot of video obviously
we love our panasonic camera that we're filming with right now but i wanted to try out sony i've
done a lot of still photography with nikon some canon a little bit of panasonic but i really like
the features that sony has to offer so i went in and got the a7 r3 this is my very first full-frame
still camera it shoots gorgeous photos and the high iso performance is kind of off the chain
i've been shooting a lot of animal photography and i'll shoot it like iso 5000 or ten thousand and it
looks pretty okay uh it'll even go up to like a hundred thousand on the iso which is just bananas
the photos aren't gorgeous by any means but i can take a photo in a dark room and it and it comes
out it's kind of bananas uh i've been working on my collection i have my 50 millimeter prime
because i always have a 50 millimeter prime for all my cameras i just love the simplicity of it
and the usefulness of that kind of lens but like i said i've been getting into animal photography
so i got this big bazooka this is a 200 to 600 millimeter lens this big obnoxious thing and i'll
use it for getting closer to animals that are far away especially birds this was really great
over the summer i visited um my family in upstate new york and took a lot of photos of things like
eagles so this was a fantastic lens uh i also love taking pictures of very small animals like
insects or hummingbirds that come to our feeder so i've got this 90 millimeter macro and this
lens is gorgeous and i can focus on things really close to the lens uh make him look gigantic
so really fun lens to shoot with my most recent acquisition has been the wide zoom this is a 24 to
70 sigma lens this is my first sigma lens and this is more of a general purpose lens for
all sorts of things i've got a bunch of nephews that uh my my brothers have their kids and
i get to be the family photographer and this is a great lens for that because those kids are running
all around the backyard and they don't respect how close like my 50 millimeter doesn't work because i
get way too close to the lens they don't know that i can't focus that close but this lens solves that
uh it's also great for taking photos of my cats which is mostly what i use it for
so that's my sony lens collection i've been having so much fun just diving into a hobby that
there aren't any expectations i can just go out and have fun take a bunch of photos and not even
show anyone if i don't want to it's been really great to have a chill hobby for the last year or
so the very last thing talking about chill and zen is a lego kit i've got this bonsai lego kit it was
a gift from my friend scotland so thank you very much my wife and i put it together it was really
fun and zen and chill and it looks wonderful and i don't have to water it i've tried growing bonsai
trees in the past and i killed them all this thing looks great year round without any water
that'll wrap it up for my favorite things of the year thank you so much for hanging out with me and
my little shop here uh most of our projects that i talked about have videos over on the punish props
academy channel if you want to go check those out thanks for watching and we'll see you next year