In the comments on yesterday’s piece about Bolt Depot’s poster of fasteners, a reader, JamesB, wrote: I would encourage budding young fabricators to also take a look at the bolt grade charts and get an inexpensive universal thread gauge. For found fasteners, the grade markings help differentiate metric from SAE, and the thread gauge helps […]
Back in January, John Baichtal wrote about the Bolt Depot’s downloadable PDF posters [PDF, 520K] of common (and not so common) screws, bolts, washers, nuts, and other fasteners. But we thought, in light of our Mechanics Skill Set coverage, we’d remind our readers of them. Not only is the PDF great, but the Bolt Depot […]
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Dim sum gets a lot cuter with these amigurumi siu mai by Stephanie from All About Ami.
Hone your woodworking skills while creating a useful shop tool by creating these simple, lovely, and very useful Japanese “low horses.”
Turns out it’s also possible to drill hexagonal hole using a very similar tool based on the Reuleaux pentagon. The video immediately above, again from jacquesmaurel, shows a tool he describes as a “Vika attachment,” mounted in a lathe, boring an hexagonal hole in a piece of stock. The video below, part of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, illustrates the process.
I love magnetic parts trays. When I’m taking something apart, using one for the screws and other tiny metal bits is one of the best things I can do (together with taking pictures as I go) to make sure that it all goes back together again more or less as it’s supposed to.
So the last time I was disassembling an appliance for repair (a video projector, in this case), and I was carefully arranging the screws for each subassembly in a separate little pile in my parts tray, it occurred to me that it’d be nice to have a magnetic parts tray with compartments for this purpose. And when I was imagining what the dividers would look like, a shape like the blade of a fruit wedger occurred to me.
For some reason, I have two fruit wedgers. I never use a fruit wedger, but when and if I ever do, I am confidant that one will meet my needs.
So I busted the plastic off ring off of one of them and, with a bit of filing to round the ends of the blades, discovered that the blade assembly fit pretty well into my 4? magnetic parts tray. And actually works pretty well as a divider, too.
