Playgrounds From the 70s
Wow, I didn’t really want to believe this, but playgrounds really did look a lot different in the 70s. Dangerous, metal… fun. Post your memories up in the comments!
Retro
Unpowered Mechanical Gate Opener, the Video
Reader captures footage of a car-powered mechanical gate opener.
Yankee Steam-Up this weekend in Rhode Island
Continuing a great tradition, the New England Wireless and Steam Museum is hosting the Yankee Steam-Up, where you can see steam engines large and small, stirling engines, running antique engines and vehicles, and much more. There is also a Marconi-era wireless museum with fascinating equipment from the early days of radio, including a Massie Station […]
Not Brian Wilson’s woodie
That’s right, it’s a wooden sports car. And although the sexy images shown here look PhotoShop-y to me, the body of the car, which is made fiberglass-style out of wooden fibers woven on a custom-built loom, appears really to be complete. You can follow Joe Harmon’s construction of “Splinter” at his site. [via Dude Craft]
Unpowered mechanical gate opener, part 2
Now here’s a perfect example of why I love the MAKE community. In response to my earlier post about the possibility of modern mechanical gate openers, reader MichaelLubke went out and took these photos (1,2,3) of a real live working mechanical gate near his ranch. What’s more, he ran down the original patent on the gate’s design! This patent, US number 3,163,947, was issued to Mr. Alvin E. Gandy of Eden, TX, in the year of Our Lord nineteen-hundred and sixty-five. His invention, known as the “Gandy Slide-A-Way,” is activated by the weight of one of your vehicle’s tires on a short steel ramp built into the driveway right in front of the gate. I wonder how many of these were ever made?
Classic gear design text free on Google Books
If you are curious about the technical details of designing and laying out gears and gear trains, you can download a complete, free, public domain copy of the 1922 edition of the American Machinist Gear Book from Google Books right now.
Bauhaucycle
This baby was designed by one Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen. From baubike.dk: The BauBike is inspired by Bauhaus design. It is constructed around the geometric shape of the square and the equilateral triangle. The design is stripped down to clean lines and raw material. The design follows a set of formal rules, limiting the geometry to […]
