Being a year-round cyclist in Minnesota, Frank Yost had a problem. “Car drivers can lock things up while running errands,” he noticed, “so why should cyclists have to carry everything around with them?” And when Frank has a problem, he reaches for his pop-rivet gun.
So he designed and built this all-weather, lockable College Bike Trunk out of riveted sheet metal, and he shows you how to build it in MAKE Volume 23 and our new online projects site, Make: Projects. For shopping errands, it’ll hold two gallons of milk with room to spare, or for our collegiate readers, an equivalent volume of barley pop. Built for northern winters, it’s sealed with auto body putty and weatherstripped with inner-tube rubber.
Frank is a one-of-a-kind MAKE author who kicks it old school — with no home computer, he takes his assignments by phone, and mails us his hand-drawn blueprints in a cardboard tube. It’s always fun unrolling them to see what’s he’s cooked up next.
Frank also wrote our Retro R/C Racer project in MAKE Volume 11, a super stylish sheet-metal 1930s British Midget racer body grafted onto a modern R/C car. In that article, Frank provides a mini-primer on sheet metal modeling, from bending in a sheet metal brake, to tips on cutting, drilling, and riveting. You couldn’t ask for a better guide to learn basic sheet metal skills.
From the pages of MAKE Volume 23:
MAKE Volume 23, Gadgets

This special issue is devoted to machines that do delightful and surprising things. In it, we show you how to make a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amp, a magic mirror that contains an animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus we go behind the scenes and show you how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper — yes, it’s real, and you wish you had one for your patio barbecue. All this and much, much more.
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