DIY science is the perfect way to use your creative skills and learn something new. With the right supplies, some determination, and a curious mind, you can create amazing experiments that open up a whole world of possibilities. At home-made laboratories or tech workshops, makers from all backgrounds can explore new ideas by finding ways to study their environment in novel ways – allowing them to make breathtaking discoveries!
I have been hacking on some cheap R/C cars, lately, and wanted to etch metal films off of a few of the bits. I knew that the usual strong acid and base suspects would remove it, but many folks don’t keep these substances around, for whatever reasons. I got curious about milder etchants, and did a simple test with some household chemicals.
Metallography is a method of materials analysis used to characterize the microscopic structure of a metal sample. Generally, the process involves cutting a sample from some object of interest, polishing its surface to high smoothness, and etching it with a chemical agent to highlight grain boundaries, inclusions, and other microstructural features. The sample is then imaged using one of a number of types of microscopy. The resulting pictures are often strikingly (if incidentally) beautiful. That’s OK by me, personally—incidental beauty is usually my favorite kind.
As promised, here’s a tasting menu featuring some of my favorite metallurgical content from our archives arranged, as usual, in mysteriously-appealing (and entirely arbitrary) top-ten format. Narrowing it down to just ten involved some hard choices; this subject is rich, and we’ve covered it a lot. A second round-up, perhaps at the close of the month, may be in order. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of cool stuff on my to-blog list, and it’s growing fast as your suggestions roll in.
By Glen Whitney for the Museum of Mathematics We’re in the midst of putting four-bar linkages through their paces. See the introductory post for this series for the MoMath Linkage Kit, an introduction, and general instructions. Last time we saw the complexity of what seems like a pretty simple mechanism: four bars, connected at their […]
Well, what’s left of August is Metals Month, I should say. A broad subject, to be sure, and with only a couple of weeks to explore it, I want to be fairly ruthless about focusing on interesting and unusual metals themselves, and processes for working with them, rather than more general “cool stuff made from metal.”
Week 4, Field Trip Friday at Maker Camp. Go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and see how early humans were the first makers.
Maker Camp, sponsored by MAKE magazine, was a virtual summer camp for teens, with a focus on creating, building, and discovering.From July 16th through August 24th, 2012, 30 awesome projects were made in 30 days, on Google+. Maker Camp is free and open to all.
Visit Makezine.com/maker-camp for more information.
For today’s Maker Camp Field Trip Friday, we travel to the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History to visit human origins researcher Briana Pobiner. From the Smithsonian’s G+ page: Briana Pobiner will show us the tools humans used for the earliest DIY projects thousands of years ago. Humans have always been makers–you might say we […]
