The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the manufacture of metal, wood, plastic, ceramic and composites. We talk about machining, using a lathe to machine metals like steel, brass, and aluminium. We make chips fly!
Back in Plastics Month, we featured a simple shop-made plastics extruder built by Instructables user Random_Canadian. Now the arbitrary Canuck returns with this pint-sized metal lathe built with a 14″ piece of precision aluminum T-slot extrusion, and some characteristically resourceful salvage including an electric motor from a cordless weed trimmer, a variable speed switch from a cordless drill, and a tailstock center improvised from a countersink.
Scares off wildlife, starts campfires, melts ice, burns weeds, and works wonders on nose hair. What could possibly go wrong? The grip is built up from laminated laser-cut 1/8″ ply. Nice design from Instructables user PDRWLSN.
The Brothers Brick has technical details, and a brief interview with builder Nick Jensen about why and how. The “Sniper Rifle System 99 Anti-Matériel” is Nick’s 10th full-size replica weapon, from the Halo universe, built entirely from Lego elements.
I set out to write a generic “props” round-up, but quickly discovered that our props tag is pretty deep, and covers a wide range of subjects including haunt props and/or prop furniture, elaborate costumes, and display props. I narrowed my focus, then, to props a person might carry around as part of a costume, and found, even then, there was more cool stuff than I could fit into one roundup.
From user Douglas Desrochers. The barrels appear to be PVC. They rotate around a piece of 1/2″ copper pipe, and a high-intensity LED is positioned to shine down the top one, strobing as the barrels spin. The whole thing is driven by the motor and battery pack from a cheap cordless drill. Let the Predator jokes commence.
Um. Wow. It’s attributed to MOCPages member PLUM B, and here described by The Brothers Brick: “[F]eatures a clip-fed firing mechanism that shoots rubber bands – perfect for taking out the paper Locust horde. If that’s not enough, the saw blade on the front of the gun is motorized for slice and dice action.”
For those of you without metric intuition, 80mm is about pi inches. For those of you without metric intuition who flunked geometry, it’s about 3.14 inches. Which am big. Like, cannonball-sized.
