The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
There’s something about the process of joining two pieces of metal together that captures people’s excitement and curiosity. Outside of a romantic idea of welding masks, torches, and flying sparks, I had no idea what I was getting into. Now that I’ve taken a few classes, I’ve learned enough to distinguish the different types of welds, their uses, and the fact that I have a lot of practice in store before my welds are worth anything.
The very word means capable of being shaped, molded. Plastic is a cheap, durable, plentiful, extremely adaptable, and variable material that can be put to seemingly endless uses, from furnishings, building materials, and machine parts, to tools, weapons, vehicles, to now just about anything that can be extruded from a 3D printing head. The downside of its cheapness and ubiquity (not to mention the polluting nature of its manufacture) is that it leads to a profusion of waste material.
I use my PanaVise Jr for all kinds of small holding tasks, particularly for holding circuit boards while soldering. One complaint I’ve always had is how darn long it takes to crank the vise’s jaws open from a closed position, or vice versa. The tiny knob takes many, many turns to do much work. One […]
The Flaming Lotus Girls create metal machines that are beautiful to look at, but often spit fire as well. Despite the name of their crew, FLG is an all inclusive group of women and men fabricators. Through their collaborative effort, the Three Mutopia Pods made for an inspiring display at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011.
For those of you without metric intuition, 80mm is about pi inches. For those of you without metric intuition who flunked geometry, it’s about 3.14 inches. Which am big. Like, cannonball-sized.
I think you’ll all get a kick out of Duane Flatmo‘s El Pulpo Mecanico, a flame-shooting octopus vehicle from this year’s Burning Man. I have to agree with Cyriaque Lamar from io9, who likens this pyrotechnical cephalopod to a video game boss. Anyone out there who wants to ride this contraption has to line up behind me!
This charming Knock Clock was made by three Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design students for a 48-hour design project. When you knock on the top of this minimalistic wooden box, it knocks back the time of day (to the nearest quarter hour). It even has a basic alarm function, which—naturally—is set by knocking as well. [via Adafruit]
