Marble-Shooting Wooden Crossbow Punches Through Plywood
Just another little bit of sweetness from Matthias Wandel, whose fantastic “woodworking for engineers” site, woodgears.ca, we have, to date, linked to more than a dozen times. See below.
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
EEG-Controlled Nerf Stampede
Chris Meyer modified his Nerf gun with a BlueSMiRF bluetooth module, NeuroSky MindSet EEG set, and an Arduino Uno — now he can fire the weapon with a mere thought! More: Visit our Make: Arduino page
Purdue Claims World Record Goldberg Machine
It starts with the Big Bang, re-creates the extinction of the dinosaurs, holds a jousting competition, flips over an album, and simulates World War II, a shuttle launch, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the alleged apocalypse in 2012. In its precisely executed review of history, “The Time Machine,” a Rube Goldberg contraption built by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, incorporates a record-breaking 244 steps—all to water a single flower.
Front Drive, Front Steer Recumbent Bike
Andrew Saylor of Wichita, KS, converted a regular bike into a recumbent, and it looks great! I love the custom seat, nice touch.
Father/Son’s Wii “MegaBar” Project
James Turner is an O’Reilly writer (who also writes from Wired, IEEE Spectrum, and the Christian Science Monitor). He and his son are avid Wii players and were tired of the anemic power of the Wii sensor bar. So they designed and built their own “MegaBar.” Now they want to develop it as a commercial […]
Skill Builder: Basic Bike Teardown
RadBrad and KoolKat, of Atomic Zombie, wrote this wonderful guide to the fine art of bicycle deconstruction. You can learn a lot about a machine by stripping it down to its constituent parts. And in this case, you end up with a lot of parts that you can combine with other parts to fab your […]
Rifled PVC Pipe For More Accurate Spud Guns
Thanks to a commenter on last week’s Now That’s A Knife post for pointing out that Jeremy Hanson’s Spudgun Technology Center has a custom machine for rifling PVC pipe to make more accurate barrels for potato cannon. They sell several varieties of rifled PVC (including clear) in assorted lengths. The way I hear it, the rifling machine was first designed and build by STC founder Ed Goldmann. [Thanks, Bryce Bell!]
