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April 19 2012
Matthias Wandel’s Carving Machine
Matthias Wandel’s Woodgears.ca may be my favorite personal maker website. It’s clean, well organized, packed with resources, and every click brings new inspiration. I can get stuck there for hours, so be careful when you click through.
This time it’s Matthias’s homemade 3D pantograph carving machine / pattern duplicator that I’m fixated on. Mechanical pattern-copying machines like this, of course, are not new. They’re often used in restoration work, for instance, to replace a damaged architectural detail by directly copying a surviving original.
There are commercial versions, but it’s also pretty common for shops to build their own, and Matthias’s is one of the best looking DIY versions I’ve ever seen. Plus, the build is documented with his characteristic attention to detail. In the embedded video, above, Matthias is using it to cut patterns of pips in giant wooden dice.
More:
Guitar “photocopier”
April 06 2012
How-To: 30 kW Induction Heater
Instructables user bwang writes:
This Instructable will walk you through the construction of a high-power (30kVA) heater, suitable for melting aluminum and steel. Note that to take full advantage of this design, you will need a 220V outlet, at least a 50A single-phase one and preferably a 50A or 60A 3-phase outlet.
Obviously, one should read, understand, and be comfortable with the safety procedures before attempting something like this, but what an awesome tool to have. Using scavenged materials, he estimates the build cost $200. It’s an entry in Instructables ongoing EXTREME! Challenge.
April 04 2012
Cast Cement CNC Chassis
Those of you who click through to read more about this very cool project from grad student Kenny Cheung of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms may be a bit disappointed: The page is not really complete yet and a bunch of the resources, including the physibles, are still “coming soon!” But it’s such a cool idea, I didn’t want to wait. Looks like the molds are laser cut and, I would expect, reusable. [Thanks, thatcherc!]
Machines That Make | Cast Cement CNC Chassis
More:
Pat Delany’s Designs for Low-Cost DIY Machine Tools
March 05 2012
How-To: Rotary Bench Cams
Clever, simple idea for a workholder that grabs automatically when you push a board into it, and releases automatically when you pull it out. From medicinal chemist and woodworker Brian Grella. From where I sit, it looks like you might only need to make one of these rotating cams, and the other side of the clamp could be a fixed, flat fence. [via Instructables]
February 23 2012
How-To: Build and Use an Afghan Box Camera
My old pal, Bay Area shutterbug Billy Baque, has a passion for the handmade, low-tech, all-in-one cameras-plus-darkrooms used by street photographers around the world. The so-called Cuban Polaroid is a typical example—a wooden box with a light-tight sleeve for the photographer’s arm at one end and a lens on the other. Billy describes the typical use:
Using photographic printing paper the photographer would expose a sheet of paper for the negative, develop, stop, and fix it inside the camera, then put a copy stand on the camera and photograph the negative (to obtain a positive), develop, stop, and fix, then wash the final print in a coffee can of water attached to his homemade tripod.
Billy just hipped me to Lukas Birk’s Afghan Box Camera Project, an ethnographic study documenting the rapidly-vanishing traditions, technologies, and skills of street photographers in Kabul. The Afghan version of the Cuban Polaroid is known as the kamra-e-faoree, and Mr. Birk has gone to considerable lengths to document its traditional construction and use, preparing a detailed build guide and an on-site video minutely recording lifelong Kabuli street photographer Qalam Nabi, in action, with his. [Thanks, Billy!]
February 10 2012
“The Ultimate Breadboard” Prototyping Station
Austrian Claudio Zachl Werbegrafik has a blog called The Amateur Engineer, and a YouTube channel with a regular show he’s been running every two weeks for a little over a year, now. In this episode, he shows off his drool-inducing Ultimate Breadboard prototyping station, mothered by necessity in a complex ongoing project to build his own oscilloscope, for which off-the-shelf breadboards proved inadequate. [via Hack a Day]
December 21 2011
Rolling Tool Table from Stacked Tires
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this clever idea for recycling dead tires (or storing new ones) from Pittsburgh’s Joe Katrincik. It’s two smaller plywood circles for the base, a larger one for the top, 6 castors, 6 screw eyes / eyebolts, and 3 ratcheting tie-down straps. I bet if one were to counter-bore the top holes, a bit, and used T-nuts instead of hex nuts to secure the top eye bolts, one could avoid having the nuts sticking up above the work surface. If one thought it mattered.
More:
- Car Tire Pottery Wheel
- Incredible tire sculptures
- How-To: Care tires to running shoes
- Twelve person tire swings
September 14 2011
How-To: Homemade Plastic Bender
Cool vid from our pals at TAP Plastics showing how to build a strip heater, which is commonly referred to as a “plastic bender,” but really doesn’t do any bending in and of itself: It’s just a long skinny heating element that makes it easy to soften a sheet of plastic along a straight line, so you can bend it with your hands to an arbitrary angle, and/or against a jig for more precise control of the bend. Misnomer aside, it’s still a very handy tool to have in your shop, and a load of fun to use, and fairly easy and inexpensive to DIY, to boot.
If you don’t want to shell out for a new heating element, they can be recovered from a junked space heater or (like this one from Instructables user xeijix) from an old toaster.
More:
Intern’s Corner – The Make: Labs plastic bender
September 09 2011
How-To: Homemade Plastics Recycler / Extruder
Interesting homemade tool from Instructables user Random_Canadian. The melt chamber consists of a length of 3/4″ iron pipe, the piston head is an off-the-shelf socket wrench, and the piston rod is a socket extension. A temperature controller, a couple of eBay cartridge heaters, a few tufts of fiberglass insulation, and some odds ‘n’ ends make for a heating system. And a brass hose barb serves as the extrusion nozzle.
Bits of recyclable thermoplastics go in the end of the pipe, and continuous extruded filament comes out the other end. I wonder if RepRap-style FDM printers, which accept plastic filament as feedstock, could use this garage-recycled material?
September 08 2011
How-To: Large Homemade Vacuum Forming Machine
From James Bruton of XRobots.co.uk. James’s take on the familiar vacuum forming machine uses a three-layer MDF sandwich for the vacuum box and forming table, with a vacuum cleaner hose connected at the bottom. His heating system is novel, in my experience, using an off-the-shelf quartz room heater at the bottom of an MDF “chimney” lined with aluminum foil reflectors. Sorry, aluminium foil reflectors. [via Hack a Day]
June 27 2011
Cream-of-the-crop DIY Softbox Designs
Thanks to Flickr user Matt Jones for hipping me to Udi Tirosh’s recent homemade softbox design contest over on DIYPhotography.net. For those, like myself, who may be unsure, a “softbox” or “soft box” is simply a diffuse lighting source for taking photos, commonly with a reflective interior and one or more diffusing panels that scatter the light and help prevent it from casting harsh shadows. The contest had seventy submissions, reportedly, and Udi has winnowed it down to his top 24. My personal favorite is one of the runners-up, shown above, by Minneapolis photographer Frank Syse. It consists of two bright CFL bulbs, an IKEA lamp cordset, a socket Y-adapter, and a cut-and-paste foamcore box.
More:
May 20 2011
Car Tire Pottery Wheel
Mississippian Hillar Bergman is known, first and foremost, as a musician—he plays the fiddle. His YouTube channel features several interesting videos describing his wonderful “post-apocalyptech” potter’s wheel, and demonstrating his skillful use thereof. (Including one in which he’s mounted it to a trailer hitch so he can use it at a lakeside campsite.) It’s just an old wheel and tire, really, mounted on an oak stump with a pair of pipe flanges and a short nipple, and spun up to speed with a tire iron stuck through the holes in the hub, but Mr. Bergman uses it with considerable skill. [via Recyclart]
May 16 2011
Pat Delany’s Designs For Low-Cost DIY Machine Tools
We have covered septuagenarian Palestine, TX, resident Pat Delany’s DIY multimachine, which is mostly built from recycled auto parts, before. Following on the success of that design, Pat has branched out, researching and promulgating three more simple build-it-yourself tool designs: A treadle-powered electrical generator, a simple compound lever drill press, and—most interesting to me—a lathe made from cast concrete and aligned with wedges sawn flush after the concrete has set up. Engineering for Change has a good overview of the story and the available online resources. [Thanks, Jake!]
May 11 2011
How-To: Detail Sander From Disposable Electric Toothbrush
An easy, useful, inexpensive, and delightful improvisation from model-maker and Instructables user WiredWebbo101, who needed a handy tool to sand primer in some hard-to-reach places on his models. So he modified a disposable electric toothbrush by flattening and pointing the head and attaching a dart-shaped piece of sandpaper. Wonderful!
April 29 2011
Top 10: Bike Repair
We have covered a lot of bike-related content over the years, and a lot of bike-repair-related content. Trouble is, we don’t have a separate repairs-only category, so assembling this round-up required manual cherry-picking from the many pages of our Bicycle category archive. I then picked my ten favorites, tabulated the pageviews for each, and counted the days since it was posted, and finally divided to get an average-traffic-per-day figure for each post. So this is probably my most scientifically-organized Top 10 to date. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Friday!
#10
How To: Make A Dial-Gauge Bicycle Wheel Building Stand For $100
”
#9
#8
Roadside Blind Welding In Malawi
#7
#6
How-To: Re-Cover A Bike Saddle
#5
#4
#3
Mister Jalopy’s Community Tool Box
#2
Make Your Own Low-Budget Wheel Truing Stand
#1
Weekend Project: Bike Repair Stand
Did I miss a good one? Let me know, below!
March 22 2011
How-To: Set Up a Basement PCB Fab & Use It To Make a POV Business Card
This Instructable from Jared Foster doesn’t just show you how to make his cool persistence-of-vision business card. It takes you through the construction of a circulating etch tank, the modification of a laminating machine to make a stencil applicator, the assembly of a controller to turn a toaster into a reflow oven, and the cobbling-together of a vacuum pickup tool for SMT components. And then you get some practice using all that cool stuff making a POV business card. It even comes with obligatory American Psycho allusions.
March 18 2011
Avoid Marring, Open Plastic Cases With A Cut Credit Card
March 09 2011
Parts Tray + Fruit Wedger Blade = Sorting Parts Tray
When I’m taking something apart, using a magnetic parts tray 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 decide to start, I am confidant that my needs will be served by only one.
So I busted the plastic ring off one of them and, after breaking off some small bits 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. I knocked the sharp edges off with a file.
February 15 2011
Make: Projects – On-Demand Benchtop Gas Generator
If you should find yourself in need of small volumes of gas at about atmospheric pressure for a reaction or project, generating it on the bench can be a convenient and inexpensive alternative to buying or renting a gas cylinder. An all-glass reactor for the benchtop production of gases was invented in the 19th century by Petrus Jacobus Kipp, who is known today primarily for this achievement. Kipp’s design incorporates the clever feature that stopping the flow of gas separates the liquid and solid reagents inside the instrument and thereby stops the reaction in short order. Thus the generator only produces gas when you need it, and may remain in a stable equilibrium state on the bench for hours or even days at a time, ready to resume operation as soon as you open the valve.
Being made of glass, however, a proper Kipp generator is an expensive piece of apparatus, with new models costing upwards of $250US as of this writing. However, as the useful gas-generating reactions are usually aqueous, rather than organic, an all-plastic Kipp generator is almost as useful as a glass version. PVC pipe is inexpensive, durable, ubiquitous, and easily and securely joined using cement made for that purpose. Demountable PVC fittings are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can be used to provide the necessary “dismantlability” for loading solid reagent into the device. Presented here is my design for such a low cost Kipp-type generator, with instructions for its construction.
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