The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
An oldie-but-goodie from a student project at Florida Atlantic University. This pipe inspection robot has a modular “train car” or “snake” construction and uses an unusual “screw drive” mechanism to pull itself along the pipe. Best of all, it comes with a very well-told story.
James Bruton of Southampton, UK, (whose DIY vacuum forming machine project was featured on the blog) wrote in to share his technique for molding and casting parts for his Iron Man costume. I designed this part for my life size iron Man suit in Autodesk 123D and had it printed at Shapeways. Then I made […]
The Beatty family is building a lovely enclosure that will hold the computer and motor control boards for a CNC, using acrylic and MicroRAX t-slot beams. After trying a few different approaches, we decided to build the box from scratch out of 1/8″ acrylic sheet and Microrax, with are tiny, 10mm 80/20 aluminum beams. The […]
Matthias Wandel’s Woodgears.ca may be my favorite personal maker website. It’s clean, well organized, packed with resources, and every click brings new inspiration. I can get stuck there for hours, so be careful when you click through. This time it’s Matthias’s homemade 3D pantograph carving machine / pattern duplicator that I’m fixated on.
French artist René Zaki shot this great time-lapse video showing the process of creating a bronze bust from a lump of clay to the finishing touches. The actual build time is shorted from 4 days to 10 minutes!
Though heavy for its class, this DIY aluminum longboard deck design from Redditor davvik gets high marks for its machine aesthetics and its accessible construction method. The truck mounting plates are simple millings, but the rest of it is stock aluminum strip and hardware-store parts.
Lior Elazary’s Mechanical CPU Clock intrigues me — it’s a clock that simulates the way a CPU works: For a CPU to do any meaningful work, it needs to be told what to do. This comes in the form of instructions. For this wall clock I will only concentrate on the hours to make things […]
