The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 not everyone is a toy (or kit) maker – I met with two engineers that just showed up with their working prototype (The Z-drive) in hopes a toy maker might use it for something. It’s pretty incredible – I think these guys are getting my “MAKE’s best of show”… The […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 I saw the German made “Swing-o-graph” – the pictures pretty much explain it all, but just in case – you put the marker/pen in the holder, a “swing” moves the paper around and creates spirograph-like designs. This is one of the products that might fall in to a (re)make – […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 there are some toy makers that are doing new things, White Wings is traditionally known for their high performance paper gliders based on the science of flight. Their planes were created by Japan’s foremost paper airplane authority, Dr. Ninomiya – they have robust balsa fuselages and special paper for the […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 Bridge Street Toys had their geek-famous hydrodynamic building sets – you can build a model of an ice cream factory, a water treatment plant, a distillation plant and many other industrial structures. It shows how a siphon works, balance the flow through the plant by adjusting the valves. The user […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 I was pleasantly surprised to find Liberty Puzzles. Liberty Puzzles are classic wooden jigsaw puzzles, made with real maple-veneer plywood and archival paper and inks. Each puzzle image is mounted on quarter-inch plywood, and then laser-cut to all sorts of puzzle designs and shapes (the pieces are little gears, people, […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 I spent way too much time with the folks from Zome – Zome is based on a version of the 61-zone structural system which includes purely mathematical models from tilings to hyperspace projections, as well as molecular models of quasicrystals and fullerenes, and architectural space frame structures. Zome’s balls (nodes) […]
@The NYC Toy fair 2008 Toyops had a giant bio-green-science area where they had their Triassic Triops, Space Farms, Just Look and Tree Toys’ Wild Science products. Triops are shrimp that look like horseshoe crabs and date back to the Triassic Period in fossil records, they’re also known as dinosaur shrimp — you bring them […]
