How Fireworks Work
A look inside of the fireworks and how they go about painting the sky with fire, light, and color.
Science
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!
Massive Bottle Rocket Mayhem
Answering the musical question: What would it be like to light over 200 bottle rockets at the same time?
Metallurgical eye candy
An alloy of 1.3% copper, 0.3% magnesium, and 0.3% manganese in aluminum, etched with potassium permanganate and lye. So I woke up this morning all pumped up to blog about metallography. If you don’t already know, metallography is a type of scientific microimaging that involves mirror-polishing metal surfaces and then etching them with various reagents […]
Garlic scapes – What to do?
For the past few years our two 4′ x 8′ raised beds have been fully dedicated to garlic production. The ultimate lazy crop, you plant garlic in the Fall, let it do its thing over the Winter, weed it a few times, cut the scapes in early July, then harvest it in late July. After […]
How-To: Homemade sunscreen
Scoochmaroo shares this recipe for basic sunscreen free of the umpteen additives used in commercial varieties. Sunscreen is intended to shield your skin from harmful UVA and UVB rays. These can cause premature aging, and more tragically, skin cancer. But commercial suncreens often involve more nasty chemicals than necessary. By making your own sunscreen, you […]
Motorcycle brake rotor repair kludge
Drilled and tapped for the screw and drilled a clearance hole for the mount bolt.At 20 threads per inch, that would be .050″ per turn. So .01″ would be 1/5 of a turn. Put on a standard six-flat nut for reference. Turn less than one flat would be .050/6 = .0083 inches, a little margin to the spec.
So, to use it, you spin and gradually drop the screw until it just touches at the highest point. Turn to the lowest point, and tighten down. Took less than one flat, so I believe I am in spec!
Explaining voltage on FMCG
In this clip from FMCG, Ken responds to Jeri’s capacitor deconstruction with his own very visual (and very mechanical) demonstration of how voltage is generated and how you can build a simple capacitor, with aluminum foil and plastic, to generate charge mechanically and dump it into the cap (analogous to how a Wimshurst machine works). […]
