Instructables

Make and Mend tricks from Tim Anderson

Make and Mend tricks from Tim Anderson

When I was editing The Best of Instructables, one of my favorite authors in the book was Tim Anderson, who also edits our regular “Heirloom Technology” column in MAKE. Tim has hundreds of Instructables, many of them collections of time-saving, energy-saving, make-do, and kludgey-cool repair tips. Here are some excerpts from his Tips articles related […]

How-To: Glowing balloons change color to show air quality

How-To: Glowing balloons change color to show air quality

Honestly, they had me at “glowing balloons.” I’ve got a box on a shelf in my closet that houses my past, failed, experiments to make floating, glowing party balloons. The group at Carnegie Mellon that produced this Instructable makes it work by using weather balloons which are bigger and can provide more buoyancy. That the LEDs they use are tri-color versions that change to reflect the ambient air quality is just icing on the cake. [via Boing Boing]

How-To: Levitate a pencil lead

Prolific, anonymous YouTube DIY science guru NurdRage, who in the past has brought us instructions for synthesizing trichlorophenyl oxalate (TCPO) and instructions for using it to make homemade glowstickx, presents this cool video and corresponding Instructable showing how to demonstrate diamagnetic levitation using common pencil lead instead of the usual (and expensive) pyrolytic graphite.