Mike Firth is a hobby glassblower in Dallas, Texas. His site includes a great page on a variety of techniques that can be applied to reclaimed glass bottles, including several methods of cutting them. The site also describes more exotic bottle-working techniques like slumping, stretching, drilling, and blowing out.
A lot can be learned about 3D modeling in Google SketchUp from these video tutorials. They are extremely well presented, and cover a lot of advanced techniques. Check out the web site for a really nice library of building timbers, more videos, and information about designing in SketchUp. More about Timber Frame Design using Google […]
In engineering, fabricating, and all-around making, it is very useful to know basic drawing styles. This will help you get your ideas out of your head and onto that napkin, or into your notebook so that you can bring them into the world. Architects, planners, designers, engineers, and others use drawing to help communicate their […]
My first soldering iron was the kind that our camp counselor, Dave Hrynkiw, recommends we never use. You know the kind, it comes in a $10 kit and barely works. The reality is, a lot of people find one on these irons in the bottom of their toolbox and start their soldering careers with it. […]
This video from the awesome British toy store Grand Illusions demonstrates a cool collapsing mechanism, which involves only paper and elastic bands, and allows a rigid display to be set up in about a second and easily folded away again for storage. The French company that makes these is called Marin’s. (Beware, their site is […]
Back in 2007, Mark hit on Don Wilkes’ 1960s invention (U.S. patent #3,452,175) of the so-called “rolamite”over at boing-boing, quoting a description of it as “the only ‘basic mechanism’ invented in the 20th century.” Basically, a rolamite is a very-low-friction bearing. Rex Research has posted the entirety of a 1966 Popular Science article covering their […]
False-color shadowgram of gunshot from a .357 magnum by Gary Settles at Penn State university. The New York Times has an awesome slideshow of shadowgrams and Schlieren photographs, created by engineering professor Gary Settles, which accompany a 2008 article about his work at Penn State’s Gas Dynamics Lab. The method, which can produce fantastic visualizations […]
