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!
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics A lathe is used to turn wood into baseball bats, spindles, and other shapes with rotational symmetry. It can also be applied to making many types of mathematical models. Bob Rollings made this construction from spindles that form the edges of an icosahedron inside of a dodecahedron. […]
MAKE’s science and chemistry author, Robert Bruce Thompson, has a new installment of his video series The Home Scientist, on acquiring chemicals for your home lab. This video is a nice companion to Bob’s piece in the Make: Science Room on the same subject: Chemicals on the cheap. See Bob’s YouTube channel for all of […]
Ron Newman’s fantastic page on DIY room-temperature anodizing of aluminum parts was last revised in 2007, and looks like it may be significantly older than that. Ron’s selling a how-to book, now, and a bunch of anodizing supplies, from the same page, but to me it looks like there’s more than enough free info there already for a savvy person to figure it out for him- or herself. And while Ron’s set-up, pictured above, may look intimidating, it’s actually possible to do this without a lot of expensive equipment.
Good commentary about how studying science can affect your World View, by Abstruse Goose.
Justin Shull built this solar-powered terrestrial shrub rover, sort of the diet version of a cupcake car.
I designed this multi-wrench years ago but just now finally managed to get a prototype water-jet-cut in stainless steel by my pal, Makers Market seller Dustin Wallace. The design features 21 distinct wrenches for metric and SAE nuts, 3 flat screwdrivers, a serrated cutting edge, a can opener, a wire breaker, a centerfinding tool, and a lanyard loop hole. It’s a long way from perfect–the can opener tooth, the serrated edge, and a couple of the tail-fins that are supposed to serve as flat-blade screwdrivers still need to have their edges ground, and the surface of the tool needs to be polished up quite a bit, but I was so stoked to get it in the mail I just had to share. The DXF file is available for download on Thingiverse.
This is a limited edition 1.000 kg solid gold bar from German designer Martin Saemmer. Its shape is mathematically interesting because, at least in its ideal form, it will “develop” its entire surface area when rolled. In other words, if you were to let it roll down an inclined plane covered with paint, its entire surface would be covered when it got to the bottom. It belongs to a class of shapes, all sharing this property, which can be characterized as the convex hull of two perpendicular circles or sectors, which is a fancy way of describing the surface you’d get if you were to shrink-wrap two disks positioned at right angles to one another on the same axis. Oloids and sphericons are members of the same class, but each term implies a specific relationship between the radii of the two disks and the distance between their centers. The familiar two-circle roller or wobbler (an example of which we showed you how to make make from two coins back in MAKE 15) is basically the same thing but without the “shrink-wrap.”
