Year: 2012

Hydro Priming Seeds with Cheetos

Brian Rawlings wrote in to share an experiment he’s working on with his 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son: using Cheetos as a hydroponic medium. Hydro-priming is the process of soaking seeds in water before planting. Hydro-priming decreases the time it takes seeds to germinate. For this experiment, we wanted to test how different concentrations of […]

Your Electronics Workbench

The Basics First, you’ll need a breadboard. You can call it a “prototyping board,” but this is like calling a battery a “power cell.” Search RadioShack online for “breadboard” and you’ll find more than a dozen products, all of them for electronics hobbyists, and none of them useful for doing anything with bread. A breadboard […]

Choose Your Tools

So far, I’ve detailed the construction of my all-purpose maker-style workshop, which I’ve nicknamed the Barrage Garage. It’s turned out beautifully, and as anticipated, it’s the envy of my maker friends. Small? Sure, it’s a mere 20 feet by 14 feet, but it has all the space required to do serious creating. It’s loaded with […]

Workshop Design Criteria

Egress A 9-foot-wide, automatic, well-insulated door outfitted with required safety equipment was essential. The huge door makes bringing materials in and out of the workspace a snap. Fenestration Natural light and a view to the outside were high on my list of priorities. Therefore, the design called for four east-facing sliding windows having a total […]

Building the Barrage Garage

As a city dweller, I’ve often looked with envy at the spacious outbuildings of my rural friends and relatives. Horse barns, potting sheds, root cellars, equipment garages — plentiful, enclosed, and private space is the one thing that makes me envy those who live beyond the end of the bus line. I think often about […]