Workshop

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.

What’s this kind of joint called?

What’s this kind of joint called?

I have built a couple of laser-cut and CNC-routed kits, recently, that use this clever arrangement of tabs, slots, and a couple bits of cheap hardware to securely butt one panel against another at a right angle. One panel has a pair of rectangular ports with a round hole in between, and the other has a matching pair of tabs with a smaller T-shaped slot between. In use, the ports receive the tabs and a screw passes through the round hole and along the upright of the T to mate with a square nut captured in the arms of the T. There are many possible variations and the technique has lots to recommend it from a manufacturer’s standpoint.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan70

Zwischenräume Robotically Destroys a Living Room

As the artistic duo RoboCoco, Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders explain:

The installation embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of a gallery. They punch holes through the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. As if the walls had ears and a hammer to pierce holes for their eyes to see. The work develops a political relationship between the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance and urban combat tactics in which soldiers are instructed to walk through private walls. The installation stages this relationship in the form of an autonomous sculptural process that marks and wounds our environment, leaving behind open scars.

Continue Reading Michael Colombo