overwhelmed, so have a key holder

I’ve been overwhelmed with stuff lately and that’s meant not getting much done that’s not interrupt-forced. Like today (Sunday), sure, I did Monsterdon, and I did bagel baking, and I even got a tiny bit started on the bike cargo trailer.

But what I spent all night doing was surprise rebuilding the oven after it decided to break in yet another way, this time involving heat protective glass on the one remaining working oven. (It’s a double oven. The second one works but can’t be controlled sanely if at all.)

So tonight I had to disassemble almost all of the front panel including both doors and that didn’t take long at all now did it, ugh.

Anyway that’s back together though I can’t test it until Monday (today, for you) but we should be limping along again. I don’t know for how long because the control panel and system continues to degrade – this is why we can’t use the lower oven at all, or the timer anymore, or a bunch of other functionality – and I’m totally thinking that even though we don’t have any money right now we should use savings and replace it because frankly I don’t know that it’s possible to get this oven into a really safe configuration at this point.

But what I said I was going to write about is my dumb little minimal key holders.

For reasons I have too many keys. These are dumb reasons but they are reasons and I can’t do anything about them, and it’s always a problem in my purse – they get tangled, they’re hard to separate without looking, and so on.

Then I saw a Laura Kampf video where she briefly showed off how she’d made a minimal key holder by filing down the heads and putting all the keys on a single axis, and how it all folds down into something like a single-ended pocketknife, and I knew what I needed to do.

I’ve made three versions so far. (They’re on Thingiverse.) The first version was really only good if you didn’t want to file down your key heads at all, because sometimes you can’t do that – well, that’s a little unfair. It was good enough that I wanted to improve it and definitely didn’t want to go back to normal keychains.

Then I made version two – for my bike keys – and they’re all a standard size and the heads are just plastic so it was really easy to make that happen and after a week I was like “WHELP I need to make a filed-key-head version of version one” and went at it:

Version two is the pinkish-purple one with the bike pictogram on the side. (I came up with that too, very pleased with it.) Version three turned out to be best with two axes and between that and the little taps I added to the key head wrappers I’m really, really happy with it.

It’s really nice being able to tell them apart trivially by touch and being able to flick out the keys needed. Flick flick flick flick flick flick flick 😀

It’s also nice to have so much more space in my little purse – which, oh yeah, is what got me started on this whole project to begin with.

Anyway that’s one thing I’ve been doing and meaning to post about for ages. Hopefully I can post more soon.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.