Furniture & Lighting

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for making furniture and home decor for every room in the house, including the garage.

Pipe Organ Desk With Programmable Pneumatic Logic Controller, Secret Compartment

Pipe Organ Desk With Programmable Pneumatic Logic Controller, Secret Compartment

I first wrote about Denver puzzlemaker Kagen Schaefer’s gorgeous purpleheart butcherblock benchtop two years ago, and now Kagen’s knocked me out again with this nigh-unbelievable desk. It features eight working wooden organ pipes that play notes when when you push in the various drawers, and also a pneumatic computer that records the sequence of notes and, when the right melody is played, opens a secret compartment. The pneumatic lock can be reprogrammed to recognize any melody. Holy smokes.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan8
Gigantic modular synth enclosure

Gigantic modular synth enclosure

Matthew Davidson’s brother built him an enclosure for his modular synthesizer. It looks very slick! ‘ve been slowly building my modular over the last 10 years or so. It started with a 6U Doepfer Basic System I bought used from Germany, with the details of the transaction hashed out via bablefish. Back then, the euro […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal10
EMSL’s 555 Footstool

EMSL’s 555 Footstool

Our friends Lenore and Windell of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, have cooked up a scale model of a 555 chip that works as a footstool. We wanted a new footstool at the lab, and somehow came across the idea of making it in the shape of our hero above, the 555 timer chip. We started […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal44
Cream-of-the-crop DIY Softbox Designs

Cream-of-the-crop DIY Softbox Designs

Thanks to Flickr user Matt Jones for hipping me to Udi Tirosh’s recent homemade softbox design contest over on DIYPhotography.net. For those, like myself, who are unsure, a “softbox” or “soft box” is simply a diffuse lighting source for taking photos, commonly with a reflective interior and one or more diffusing panels that scatter the light and help prevent it from casting harsh shadows. The contest had seventy submissions, reportedly, and here you can read about Udi’s top 24.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan4

Kanagawa Kinetic Coffee Table

I think William “Alex” Mecker’s Kanagawa Coffee Table would make a nice conversation piece in any living room. And at the very least, serves as excellent inspiration for laser cut furniture and mechanics. Inspired by the work of kinetic sculptors Theo Jansen & Reuben Margolin, the Kanagawa Coffee Table is the result of a merge […]

Continue Reading Matt Richardson2