Month: June 2011

Showing Off Aluminum’s Natural Reactivity via Gallium Alloy

Showing Off Aluminum’s Natural Reactivity via Gallium Alloy

Very interesting vid from 16-year-old Hayden Parker, who impressed me greatly with his animated chemistry demonstrations at Maker Faire. Metallic aluminum can be dissolved in liquid gallium to create an aluminum-bearing alloy that is liquid at ambient conditions. Because it can flow in the alloy, the aluminum cannot form a stable passive oxide layer and will react violently with water, which nicely demonstrates the normally-hidden high natural reactivity of metallic aluminum.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan1

How-To: Curate and Store a Fabric Stash

I learned so many great tips from The Art of Choosing series over at In Color Order. Jeni has written posts covering how to sort your fabrics most effectively by colorway, how to fold them for easy storage, and several options for keeping them tidy and easy to use. (There are also posts on how […]

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Birthday Postcards/Poster Project

Last year, I posted about Jordan Ferney’s awesome birthday postcard/poster project. She’s back with a beautiful, downloadable version that you can use to create your own fun birthday surprise for someone. You download the pdf … made up of 25 different pages that each have a part of the poster or “piece of the puzzle” […]

Continue Reading Rachelhobson2

3D-Printed House Keys

Nirav Patel printed working house keys on his RepRap. It occurred to me recently that I had printed almost nothing actually useful on my RepRap 3D printer, aside from parts to improve on or build more RepRaps. I am rectifying that with this project. The goal here is to generate working house keys by inputing […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal10
How-To: Operate a Homemade Scanning Electron Microscope

How-To: Operate a Homemade Scanning Electron Microscope

When we last checked in on Ben Krasnow’s homemade SEM, he had just achieved his first successful image with the device. As his latest video shows, the project has come a long way since then. It’s a long clip, by internet standards, at almost 10 minutes, but Ben does a great job of communicating what he’s doing and why, taking us through each step in the imaging process, from loading the sample, through pumping down the vacuum chamber and powering up the electronics, to fine-tuning the image itself.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan2