Tips of the Week: Bigger Bar Clamps, Lighting Your Safety Glasses, Lego Cable Holders

Tips of the Week is our weekly peek at some of the best making tips, tricks, and recommendations we’ve discovered in our travels. Check in every Friday to see what we’ve discovered. And we want to hear from you. Please share your tips, shortcuts, best practices, and tall shop tales in the comments below and we might use your tip in a future column.

Extending Bar Clamps

This definitely falls into that “Why didn’t I think of that?” category. You can make bar clamps as big as you want by simply moving the grip mechanisms to a longer piece of steel bar stock.

Lego Cable Holders

I shared this wonderful little discovery from RethinkReuseIt (that Lego people’s hands are the perfect size to hold desktop tech cables) on my Facebook wall to many likes and shares. So, I thought it was worth sharing here.

MacGyvering a Battery Pack

Make: contributor Jose Gomez-Marquez posted this little #irmahack to his Twitter feed. Now THAT is a MacGyver!

Quick and Easy Halloween Ghosts

I see dozens (and dozens) of these image and GIF-based project meme posts per week. This one caught my eye because it’s something I might actually want to do. Some fabric, a doll (wait, I need a doll), and some fabric stiffener, and you have a convincingly spooky Halloween ghost.

Keeping Teardown Parts Put with a Sticky Mat

In case you missed it yesterday, Sean Ragan shared this excellent Quick Tip on using a sticky elastomer car dash mat (available on Amazon for under $10) to keep small parts secure while doing a tech teardown.

Add Lights to Safety Glasses

While poking around in the stacks of old Make: content this week, I bumped into this project I had missed when it was published. In it, product design engineer Jude Pullen shows you how to quickly and easily add removable magnetic lights to your safety glasses using Sugru (silicone-based moldable glue).