 And yes, ha ha. Gotcha. Stupid thing. Suck it up! In this video, I'm gonna show you how I built this awesome hose reel, which I should have done years ago. This project starts like most projects, by making a plan. I designed this hose reel on a computer first, which is beneficial for a few reasons. It allows me to work out the details of how everything fits together and works. This helps me reduce mistakes and avoids wasted materials. The other benefit is it allows me to share this design with others by making a step-by-step build plan that I can share with others. And more on this later if you're interested on making this reel yourself. I knew I wanted the reel to be made from plywood, have a handle for winding it up, and some sort of lock to keep it from unwinding by itself. The build of this reel can be divided into three parts. There's the reel, a housing, and a brake. The reel holds the hose and has an air supply through the middle, which doubles as the axle. The housing is just a couple of sides in the back that hold the reel. And the brake assembly keeps the reel from unwinding itself. Add a swivel air connector on one side and a handle on the other. And there we go, we've got a reel. Using my plans, I finished laying out all the parts onto various scrap pieces of plywood. And once that's finished, we can go ahead and start cutting everything out. The reel sides need to be nice and round. There's a few methods to do this, but I went with first cutting out the circles on the bandsaw, slightly oversized, and then trimming them to size using the router. The next hole to drill is in the reels and I can't reach the center of the reel with my small drill press. And it is important that this hole is right in the center and straight up and down. And so to drill it by hand, I've made this drilling guide from a scrap piece of wood. And I made this on the drill press by first drilling a 1 1⁄8 inch hole all the way through the scrap piece of wood. Then I lowered the bed and made sure the drill bit still lined up with the 1⁄8 inch hole. Then I swapped out for the much larger 9 1⁄6 drill bit that I'm using to drill the axles for the center of these parts. And then I drilled that hole about 3⁄4 of the way through the scrap piece of wood. That leaves me with this block with a large countersunk hole with the 9 1⁄6 diameter and a 1⁄8 inch hole through the center of it. I can now take my 1⁄8 inch drill bit and insert it into the 1⁄8 inch hole. And then I've got an 1⁄8 inch pilot hole in the center of this reel. That's the same drill bit that we used for routing the outside circle. And that will center our drilling guide right over the center of these reels. And then I'm gonna use the hole that we already drilled for the dowels to insert a couple of clamps through. And that'll hold the drilling guide in place. I can separate the two pieces from each other now and I'm just gonna put a mark on matching holes here because these probably aren't perfectly aligned in space and so we wanna assemble it back together in the same orientation that we made the parts. I'm gonna go ahead and round over the edges with a router to make it a little bit smoother and nicer to touch, sand both sides and then we'll be able to glue this reel together. I cut all the dowels to the right length using the bandsaw. So I'm ready to glue up the two halves of the reel. Now to make the assembly a little bit easier, I cut these two spacer blocks from some scrap wood and they will just go in between the two reels and they will keep the reels at the correct distance away from each other and also make sure that they're parallel to each other and that should help keep the reel running smoothly without any wobble after it's all glued together. I added a couple more clamps to pull those spacer pieces tight to each other against those dowels and that should help straighten things out and checking it with a square that looks pretty good. It's touching the square on both top and bottom reels. These spacers need to line up with the hole in the reel and I'm just gonna use a piece of the pipe that's eventually gonna go in here to make sure it's lined up. Now that the reels put together, we can go ahead and work on the first sections of pipe for this project. I'm gonna be using this quarter inch stainless steel pipe and I like this for a couple of reasons. First, it's available at most hardware stores so it's pretty easy to find. It's got a convenient outside diameter of about nine sixteenths of an inch and so using that nine sixteenths drill bit from before we can get a pretty snug fit and this will work great for an axle without too much slop and we won't need any extra bearings or bushings or parts to make this run pretty smooth. That also fits half inch washers pretty well and so that works well for adding spacers and whatnot when we need it. I'm just going to assemble these parts together using some thread seal tape so that it will be air tight and we can go ahead and get this reel all complete. I'll be able to tighten this better once I get the other pipe pieces connected so for now I'm just gonna snug it up by hand and then these small pipe cramps in the middle are gonna keep the pipe from sliding back and forth so I'm just gonna set those where it's at right now and then move on to the next step. I've been waiting for the glue to dry on these dowels so I can go ahead and trim these flush and I think it's dry enough now I'm gonna go ahead and do that with the router. With the hose reel done we can move on to the housing. The housing side pieces don't have to be perfect so just a rough cut on the bandsaw followed by some sanding is good enough. What is important is that the axle hole is in the same spot on both sides so that hole was drilled with both pieces still screwed together. The back of the housing fits into some dados cut into the side panels. I did this with the dado blade but you could obviously do this with a router too. Besides the two sides of the housing there's also the back of the housing which is just this rectangular piece with a single hole in it and that's gonna fit into the dado that's in the side of the housing. And then there is the handle that goes at the top of the housing and I just cut this using a force mirror bit to do the large diameter holes and then connect the holes together with a jigsaw and then sanded the edges so that it feels nice for a handle. I'm gonna add a single washer on either side of the reel to keep the friction down. The reel does run pretty smooth. I'm pretty happy with how easy it is to turn. You can't see even though despite my best efforts to build this thing square and parallel and try to keep the wobble down there still is a little bit of wobble but that doesn't really matter as long as the reel spins freely. That's the main thing that matters. There's one more component that we need to make for this reel and it's my favorite part and that's the brake assembly that goes on the bottom here and that controls how fast this reel can spin and keeps the hose from unwinding too quickly and just gives a little bit more control to the reel. Here is the completed brake assembly and now we just have to line it up to the reel in the right spot. I've got the brake assembly in the spot I like right now. You can see the rub plate is tangent to the outside of the wheel so it's touching it more or less flat and I've got about an eighth to three sixteenths of compression on this spring assembly and you can see that by the gap under the head of the bolt there. So the way that this brake assembly works is that this rub plate here is always going to put a little bit of pressure on the outside of the reel and that little bit of friction is gonna keep the reel from just free running and it'll keep the hose wound up instead of dropping the hose by itself and if you remember from before the wobble that's not really a big deal because since this whole spring assembly is floating it can adjust for that wobble. You can see it moving there as it wobbles. The brake assembly is still able to push on the outside of the wheel and then the other cool feature of this assembly is this brake release mechanism on the bottom here and by pressing down on the rub plate and then up on the brake release that disconnects the rub plate from touching the reel and now it's back to a free running reel and so for like winding up the reel you could undo the brake and it's easy to wind up and if you want the brake friction you just push in the brake release lever and now there is the brake applied. I'm thinking I want just a little bit more friction on here and so I'm going to add a couple more of washers under these springs to compress them a little bit more and we'll see if that increases the friction to where I think it should be. I ended up using some 5-6-tenths nuts instead of washers because my springs actually went inside the inside diameter of those quarter inch washers and with that extra spring compression I think this slows down and has a more friction kind of what I was looking for and I can still release the brake and it spins fine. Put the brake on it works good. That's screwed in place. This hose reel has one more feature and that's a French cleat on the back to hang it on the wall and make it easily removable so attach one portion of the cleat on the top. The wall portion of the cleat has a T-nut buried in the bottom and that's so that we can secure the hose reel to the cleat and that'll make for an easy way to take it on and off the wall. The last couple of bits of hardware to finish off the hose reel are the handle which is just made from more of the quarter inch pipe. There are two elbows here and a straight section and then for the knob this is just another circle cut out of the same plywood and another straight piece of pipe and an end cap and a couple of washers make up the knob and then on the other side is this 90 degree swivel and that allows the hose to spin and wind up without getting it all tangled. The hose reel is finally finished and I'm ready to put a hose on here and wind it up but before I do that I like to finish all of my projects with either some kind of paint or polyurethane to protect them and keep them looking good over time and so off camera I will go ahead and finish this all up and make it look pretty and I'll bring you back when it's all done. It's way too nice to use. One second. I was so happy with how the first hose reel turned out that I had to make two. One just for the workshop and this one just for the garage. Since I already made one reel using typical woodworking tools I made the second one on my new CNC machine. I won't go into detail on this since this isn't really a CNC video but as it turns out this is a great project for the CNC since there's lots of circles. As I mentioned before earlier in the video I made a full set of plans for this project including a material cut list, hardware list, detailed drawings and step-by-step assembly instructions. I'll include a link in the description to where you can get the plans if you'd like to build one yourself. And if you have access to a CNC machine the plans will also include a few file formats for cutting out on CNC machines. I'm gonna hang my new hose reel right underneath my mini dust collector and I've got the French cleat attached to the wall here. It's high enough on the wall that I shouldn't run into it but it's not too high that I can't reach the handle. And if you remember from before there's a T-nut buried in the French cleat and that's for a star knob to lock this in place. I of course 3D printed this knob but it's similar to what you can buy in the stores. And by throwing that into the T-nut that will lock the hose reel to the French cleat and keep me from accidentally bumping it and knocking it off the wall because that would suck. Now it's gonna wrap this one up. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next project.