How a Differential Gear Works
Wonderful industrial film from the 1930s showing how a car’s differential gear works.
Education
Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
Home science projects from Exploratorium
Julie Yu, a post-doc at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, has a really good collection of unusual home lab activities on her page, including a home column chromatography experiment using common materials, which is the first of its kind I’ve seen.
Some MAKEcation soldering suggestions
We hope you and your family are having fun learning how to solder. If you are, take some pictures and load them to the MAKE Flickr pool. The first five people who load family soldering pics and tag them “MAKEcation” will get a free Maker’s Notebook. To help give you some ideas for projects you […]
Student-made equipment in the Pratt metal shop
My pal Ross Connard is a Junior at the Pratt Institute and has a student job as a technician in the school’s Fine Arts Metal Shop. The shop has a cool tradition of students building their own equipment and leaving it behind for subsequent generations of students to use. Shown above is a custom stencil […]
How-To: Take Schlieren photographs at home
My post last week about shadowgraphy and Schlieren photography generated a lot of enthusiastic responses and not a few requests for a more detailed tutorial. Among the comments was one by Ian Smith, who has a great page here describing his own Schlieren photography set-up. (While you’re there, take a moment to appreciate the fact […]
Drawing techniques for making
In engineering, fabricating, and all-around making, it is very useful to know basic drawing styles. This will help you get your ideas out of your head and onto that napkin, or into your notebook so that you can bring them into the world. Architects, planners, designers, engineers, and others use drawing to help communicate their […]
Rolamite videos
Back in 2007, Mark hit on Don Wilkes’ 1960s invention (U.S. patent #3,452,175) of the so-called “rolamite”over at boing-boing, quoting a description of it as “the only ‘basic mechanism’ invented in the 20th century.” Basically, a rolamite is a very-low-friction bearing. Rex Research has posted the entirety of a 1966 Popular Science article covering their […]
