Workshop

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.

Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione

The video below is a lengthy but insightful interview with legendary Italian maker Enzo Mari. His 1974 manual Autoprogettazione offered nineteen designs using readymade cuts of timber, to build tables, chairs, bookshelves, and even beds. He essentially open-sourced the home furnishings industry. His designs usually required nothing more than a hammer and nails. You can […]

Mobile Surfboard-Building Classroom

Mobile Surfboard-Building Classroom

Maine-based Grain Surfboards is a small maker-run company on the coast that hand-makes sustainably cut, locally milled white cedar wooden surfboards. Aside from their dedication to environmental responsibility, what sets Grain apart is that they also offer DIY surfboard kits and a variety of surfboard-building classes. Their newest undertaking is their successfully funded mobile surfboard-building […]

Inside MIT’s Hobby Shop

Inside MIT’s Hobby Shop

It’s remarkable how the MIT Hobby Shop presages aspects of the hackerspace movement… In the 1937-38 academic year, Vannevar Bush, then Vice President of MIT, granted a group of 16 MIT students permission to use a room in the basement of building 2. With equipment they found around the Institute they set up a wood […]

Inexpensive “Click-and-Scan” 3D Scanner Soars on Indiegogo

Inexpensive “Click-and-Scan” 3D Scanner Soars on Indiegogo

The Photon, an affordable 3D scanner, has already quadrupled its $80,000 Indiegogo goal, with still two weeks to go. Almost as gratifying: the Photon has generated a flurry of proposed uses for the device beyond the original “maker hobbyist” market they were targeting. The Photon is the first product from Toronto-based company Matterform, founded by friends and collaborators Adam Branejs and Drew Cox.