Seven complete builds shipped. Five more in production. Every part purchased on my own dime, installed with my own hands, verified on real jobsites in Truckee, Tahoe, and beyond.
From Amazon order to running heat in the tool truck. Wiring harness, mounting bracket, exhaust routing through the floor pan, fuel tank sourcing, ducting routing to the cab, thermostat tuning. Affiliate-linked parts list. Honest cost breakdown. The punch list of what I'd change next time.
Bluetooth audio that survives the jobsite. Pelican 1600 case, Alpine SPR-60C component speakers, Rockford Fosgate Prime amp, sealed AGM battery in a custom welded steel cradle. Real sound. Built tough. Ready for trucks, UTVs, snow grooms, and off-grid camps.
Single-axle enclosed cargo trailer wired with dual-voltage 12V house + 110V shore power, 8-channel lit marine switch panel, LED strip lighting, and DeWalt jobsite saws on dedicated platforms aimed straight out the open ramp door. Documented step-by-step across nine build phases, with full electrical schematic and a complete materials list. Eight years on the road and counting.
Six days, one CAT 299 compact track loader, twelve tons of Sierra granite. A forgotten residential side yard turned into a permanent boulder retaining feature with drainage grade + cut paths + finished decomposed granite top dress. Get the boulder faces right and the wall looks like it's been there a hundred years. Get it wrong and it looks like a pile of rocks. This one got the faces right.
V1 + V2 — two builds on one page · garage to pro room · 26-sec hero video. Opens with a 26-second cinematic showing the iPhone AI motion capture (Onform) → AirPlay to Apple TV side monitor → Garmin R10 launch monitor → annotated swing → V2 reveal. V1 (Dec 2022): Net Return enclosure + Garmin R10 + tripod projector, built in a single afternoon, $1.8K all-in. V2 (Mar-May 2024): permanent built-out room with ceiling-mount projector, wall-anchored impact screen, full green carpet, dual TVs, club rack — same garage bay, fully committed. R10 carried over. Real photos throughout, no AI artwork. Switch tabs at the top of the page to pick a build.
Stick-framed 10×12 mono-slope shed tucked between mature pines on a Truckee lot. Cream-painted lap siding, matte-black painted lower wainscot, 6-lite white prehung door, casement window, dark-gray standing-seam metal roof. Built from foundation to weather-tight across a Sierra winter, then dialed in with a landscape grade and granite boulder finish.
Empty two-bay Sierra garage transformed into a full workshop + golf-simulator hybrid across nine months. Husky modular cabinet wall, custom 2×6 workbench with pegboard tool grid, DeWalt ToughSystem stack, ceiling-mounted overhead wire racks sized off the wheelbase so the BMW still parks inside. The garage that earns its square footage twice.
Every build page, photo edit, video render, and transcript on this site comes off a 100% free toolchain. No subscriptions, no paid plans. The same six tools used here are what most one-person shops actually need — listed plain so other Truckee makers can pick them up the same week.
The same NLE Hollywood uses for color and audio. Free tier is full-featured — multicam, Fusion VFX, Fairlight audio, the works. Replaces Premiere + After Effects.
davinciresolve.com →OpenAI Whisper running locally on the Mac. Drag in any audio or video file, get a transcript in minutes. Free, offline, no upload, no usage cap. Perfect for build-video narration scripts.
MacWhisper →Royalty-free music + sound effects. No attribution required for most tracks, no demonetization on YouTube. Lots of cinematic and jobsite-appropriate beds.
pixabay.com/music →Microsoft's free DALL-E 3 frontend. 15 boost credits per day, then slower-queue free. Used here for cinematic build banners + hero artwork when the real photo doesn't exist yet.
bing.com/images/create →Free daily credits for AI-generated video. Image-to-video and text-to-video both supported. Good for cinematic 5-second intros + B-roll fillers when the real footage isn't there yet.
klingai.com →The Swiss Army knife of video. Resize, convert, splice, watermark, extract audio, batch-encode — all from the terminal. Install once with brew install ffmpeg and never need anything else.
The principle. Spend $0 on the toolchain, spend the money on the tools that build the actual thing — the welder, the saw, the camera, the lights. Software has gotten free; hardware has not. Optimize accordingly.
Drafted, photographed, parts logged. Waiting on edits. Drop alerts go out on Instagram and YouTube when each goes live.
Custom-built rolling station fabricated by CC Welding. Fits MIG, stick, plasma, gas bottles, and the grinder rack.
DeWalt 20V/60V/FLEXVOLT charging rack that lives in the work truck. 12 batteries hot at any time, inverter-fed.
Service body conversion. Drawers, ladder rack, compressor, lighting. Three years of iteration. The mother of all builds.
The 4 AM snow-removal lighting kit. Tower-mounted DeWalt FLEXVOLT, swappable batteries, runs all morning.
Full renovation walkthroughs. Excavation, concrete, framing, finish. Every job costed honestly. Real numbers, real outcomes.
Got a build worth sharing? Submit yours and the best ones get featured here with full credit and a link to your channel.
Submit a build →Send me your DIY work — diesel heaters, welding rigs, jobsite hacks, drainage tricks, anything mechanical or electrical you've cobbled together that worked. Best ones get featured with credit. No selling, no fluff. Just real work.