Tools

All about the radial arm saw

All about the radial arm saw

As a petite lady, I’ve always been absolutely petrified of a common, versatile, but big and dangerous woodshop tool called the radial arm saw. My art school woodshop had one of these monsters, and the shock-and-awe-type safety demonstrations from our burly shop manager had me nervous around the thing even when it was off, and […]

xkcd’s submarine ROV

xkcd’s submarine ROV

Renowned webcomic artist Randall Munroe built a submersible ROV starting with a commercially-available parts kit: The kit comes with a good set of underwater motors and a sensitive camera, and this summer I started modifying it to use an Arduino and joystick control, running the whole thing over Cat-5 cable (which significantly lightened the tether). […]

My Little Pony soldering unicorn

My Little Pony soldering unicorn

Sparkles, here, is the creation of LA hackerspace denizen Matt Pinner, based on a concept by Sean Bonner. More pics in the Crash Space Flickr pool. “The value of something like this,” Sean observes, “is pretty obvious.”

Although it may be hard to top the My Little Pony version, this could be a fun game, for awhile. Mr. Potato Head, maybe?

How-To: ShapeLock assistive spoon

How-To: ShapeLock assistive spoon

Gregg at Instructables made this assistive spoon using nothing more than thermoform plastic and, well, a spoon. One commenter points out that the package advises against moulding the plastic around body parts, but I wonder if that’s so that you don’t end up with a permanent (and therefore possibly dangerous to remove) bracelet or worse, […]