The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the manufacture of metal, wood, plastic, ceramic and composites. We talk about machining, using a lathe to machine metals like steel, brass, and aluminium. We make chips fly!
On a recent visit to Manchester to attend the Future Everything summit, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit the UK’s first fab lab, housed in a striking, slab-like building in the waterside district of one of Britain’s great industrial cities. I spoke to Eddie Kirkby (of the Manufacturing Institute) and Haydn Insley (fab lab manager) to find out how the fab lab movement is spreading into the UK.
Arthur Sacek‘s lathe works on floral foam. A project he has been working on since 2005, Arthur recently rebuilt the lathe using the still-robust RCX microcontroller brick, the precursor to the soon-to-be-replaced NXT brick. [via The NXT Step]
There is a kernel of a really cool idea in the Carma Project, sponsored by ad firm Leo Burnett Lisbon. They made a bike with as many reclaimed car parts as possible, and it looks kinda sweet! That said, I really would have preferred that it had been made out of 100% car parts, even […]
Prop designer Eric Hart designed these plausibly cast-iron benches in Inkscape, then his wife Natalie output them on a CNC router, then Eric cleaned them up with a Dremel and painted them to look like iron. He had only 15 days from the first rehearsal to opening night. They look great!
In each bi-monthly episode of DiResta (every other Wednesday at 2pm PT), artist and master builder Jimmy DiResta (Dirty Money, Hammered, Against the Grain, Trash for Cash) lets us into his workshop, to look over his shoulder while he builds whatever strikes his fancy. On this episode of DiResta, Jimmy continues with his restoration of […]
Affordable and hobbyist-friendly manufacturing tools that convert polygons into physical objects have been available for more than a decade. Although new technologies such as ABS extruders are different in many ways, it’s reasonable to suspect that the prospects of home manufacturing may have relatively little to do with the choice of a particular tool.
Kevin Osborn was tired of worrying about getting dust from his ShapeOko CNC mill into his computer. Using a Raspberry Pi and an AlaMode shield he can now send G-Code to the machine over his wireless network, leaving his computer clean and available for other tasks. According to Kevin, “this is of the simplest and most rewarding applications of AlaMode.”
