The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
A reduction gear train made of pine plywood sheathing scraps laminated together with screws and powered by a 3/4 h.p. electric motor. Herringbone or Chevron gears are stronger than spur gears and do not have any tendency to move along the axle even under heavy loads. There are no bearings other than the center hole […]
Michael Zheng of PetaPixel credits these beautiful photographs to one Duncan Meeder, whose personal web presence, if it exists, escapes my Googling. This example is identified as a Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm.
Maurice Connolly built a 300 lb steel sculpture and dropped it off a cliff. He pitted his art against gravity, just to see what would happen. The piece is a massive sphere called Ganymede- constructed from recycled wine barrel hoops and hundreds and hundreds of bolts. Once Maurice mastered the material and perfected the form, he turned his curiosity towards force, motion, and the nature of unpredictability.
Maurice’s freshly distorted sphere will be at Maker Faire Bay Area, May 21 & 22. You can meet him and ask about tensile strength, conical strips of steel, and what it feels like to drop your art off a cliff.
We have covered septuagenarian Palestine, TX, resident Pat Delany’s DIY multimachine, which is mostly built from recycled auto parts, before. Following on the success of that design, Pat has branched out, researching and promulgating three more simple build-it-yourself tool designs: A treadle-powered electrical generator, a simple compound lever drill press, and—most interesting to me—a lathe made from cast concrete and aligned with wedges sawn flush after the concrete has set up. Engineering for Change has a good overview of the story and the available online resources. [Thanks, Jake!]
If you want to apply a maker’s mark or other repeated pyrograph to wooden goods, but can’t justify the expense of a custom branding iron, a practically identical effect can be achieved by applying a strong solution of ammonium chloride, for instance using a foam rubber stamp, followed by relatively mild heat.
Doug Conner‘s Stirling engine may be viewed at the upcoming Bay Are Maker Faire. Check it! This Stirling engine delivers 1W to a stepper motor used as generator to power a high-power LED. This engine uses electrical heating for simplicity and to simplify efficiency measurements. At 1.7% efficiency, it’s not a good way to power […]
Don’t let the sexy name fool you, the Extech 382213 is all business — the business of powering your awesome hacking projects! The 382213 plays the desktop power supply role — it gives you carefully measured voltages to play with when working on a project, reducing the number of batteries you might waste, as well […]
