The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
Pollymecca the housetruck pulled up in front of MAKE headquarters earlier this week, and she was lovely. Inspired by gypsy caravans and British “living wagons,” maker John Labovitz set out to create a house on wheels complete with a workspace for his projects in photography, programming, and research. His website lays out all the technical […]
Josef Průša saw last week’s post about choosing a silicone for casting soft button arrays and pointed me to his printable mold for such arrays on Thingiverse. The model was produced in Clifford Wolf’s awesome OpenSCAD 3D modeling package, and the .scad script is available for download with the Thing. It has been parametrized to produce molds of button arrays having any number of rows and columns–all you have to do is change two values. The individual buttons are sized to match the SparkFun 2×2 button pad used on the monome, and also include backside recesses for LEDs.
Ever since I made my first ninja throwing star in metal shop class, I’ve always wanted to make my own knife. But I was put off by the notion of having to acquire the furnace, anvil, leather apron, and handlebar mustache requisite for forging a proper tempered blade. So, instead I decided to make a utility knife by cutting out a pattern from a circular saw blade, using my Dremel Rotary Tool.
In this first episode “The Desk,” we talked to experts Alice Twemlow, Eric Abrahamson, Massimo Vignelli, David Miller, Kurt Andersen, Søren Kjær, Alfred Stadler, Jennifer Lai, and Ben Bajorek and creates an historical and relevant film about the relationship between the worker and the desk and how this reflects on personality and habits. [Via Kottke]
MAKE pal Steve Cooley, who manufactures the Beatseqr hardware performance controller, has posted the lab notes from his recent experiments with various silicone products for casting monolithic soft button arrays. I love it when people do this–the steps and missteps that happen along the way are often as interesting, and as helpful, as the finished product.
The return grille mounting in my new house was very sloppy, with a mixture of Molly bolts, toggle bolts, and bare screws in drywall. The sloppy workmanship annoyed me, and made swapping the filter way more work than it needed to be, so I came up with this easy no-tools fix. It could easily be adapted to most steel maintenance panels.
John Park uses a Dremel oscillating tool to create a hollowed-out secret book safe/stash.
