Lego syringe
Our own Sean Ragan whipped up this entirely-Lego syringe— what a frightful delight! Parts list, instructions, and a kit are available if you want to make your own.
Fun & Games
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for bikes, rockets, R/C vehicles, toys and other diversions.
Bowl made from melted little green army men
Dominic Wilcox wants £159 for his 2002 piece War Bowl, which may make some amount of sense since Wilcox is a fairly well-established “name” artist, and the piece itself has been exhibited in various fancy places. Still, you can make your own version by partially melting a bunch of army men in a glass or metal bowl in the oven, and it’ll cost you just a buck or two. [via Gizmodo]
How-To: Build a Lego Death Star ornament
Chris McVeigh brings us this adorable pint-sized holiday version of everyone’s favorite futuristic superweapon of interstellar genocide. You’ll need Lego Digital Designer to read his files. [via The Brothers Brick]
How-To: Make an inverting top
An inverting or tippe top is a classic physics toy: a spinning top that spontaneously inverts itself to spin on its handle at high speed, then rolls back over onto its base when it stops. Turns out, four spheres joined in a close-packed tetrahedron will do the same thing, and this quick video tutorial from YouTuber VTK9990 shows one made from four marbles and some epoxy. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
MAKE magazine physical easter egg finally discovered
It took five years, but a reader–specifically Flickr user Tom Arthur–finally figured out the secret feature we designed into the magazine, oh very much definitely on purpose, back in 2005: It’s sized to fit perfectly inside a classic NES case. Tom is now the only reader able to equip the Soldering Iron of 1000 Truths. Congrats! [Thanks, Tom!]
Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Bikes
Bicycles could quite possibly be the most popular maker vehicles. Here are some bikes and bike accessories for the cycle-friendly folks on your gift list. College bike trunk, DIY on Make: Projects by Frank Yost, from MAKE 23 Growing up, I would often visit my grandparents in Dinkytown, the southeast Minneapolis neighborhood near the University […]
How-To: Build Nob Yoshigahara’s “Dualock” cross puzzle
I built one of these years ago from plans I saw in Slocum and Botterman’s New Book of Puzzles, and still delight in playing with it, so I was pleased as–geez, I can’t say “pleased as punch” and still respect myself in the morning, so I’ll just leave it at “really pleased”–to see this new tutorial from Instructables user Phil B about how it’s done. From the outside, the puzzle is deceptively simple: You can guess from Phil’s description that you’ve got to spin it, to win it, but there’s a devious twist. The book I saw it in had a picture of a clear plastic version that showed off how the mechanism worked, but that makes it rather too easy to figure out; the best way to appreciate Yoshigahara’s design is to build one for yourself, then give it to somebody else to puzzle over.