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DIY FREE!! Printable USGS PDF Quads

National Geographic Quad Examples

A Quick, Easy, and Free way to Download any Quad in the Country

National Geographic has built an easy to use web interface that allows anyone to quickly find any quad in the country for downloading and printing. Each quad has been pre-processed to print on a standard home, letter size printer. These are the same quads that were printed by USGS for decades on giant bus-sized pressed but are now available in multi-page PDFs that can be printed just about anywhere. They are pre-packaged using the standard 7.5 minute, 1:24,000 base but with some twists:

  • Page 1 is an overview map showing the Quad in context
  • Pages 2 through 5 are the standard USGS Quads cut in quarters to fit on standard printers
  • Hillshading has been added to each page of the PDF to help visualize the topography
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Repurposing Pallets into Garden Chairs

From this plan on Instructables I made a pair of Adirondack chairs for my garden area from pallets that were being disposed of at a nearby factory.  They were recycling the shredded wood, I simply repurposed the wood.

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And then I used the scrap pieces for a celebration fire to “test” the chairs in use.

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And when I was completely done, I had enough left over screws and scraps to put together some sawhorses.  The tops of the sawhorses are repurposed scraps from a construction site disposing of them in the landfill dropbox.  They were but small scraps to them, and here they are pretty darn useful.

More useful if I had these before the project, but I wasn’t sure how much useable wood might be left over.

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