The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
I designed, pre-fabricated, hauled, and then re-assembled a treehouse I’ve dubbed “The Wolfe’s Den” (Wolfe being the last name of the woman I built it for), and luckily had Steven Sherrick of Modern Vintage Productions to help document the laborious process.
This year marks my first Maker Holiday Season. As I wrote about in my last column, it’s given me an opportunity to reflect on what the last few months have meant. It’s also opened up a whole new world of possibilities: gifts I can make!
I was very interested when I got the PR about the Q Knot reusable rubber ties from a company called UTWire. They work on the same principle as standard plastic zip-ties but they can be fairly easily pulled apart and reused. If you crossed a rubber band with a zip-tie, you’d get a Q Knot.
We covered Flickr user yamamo2’s (and his father’s) first high-performance double pendulum build back in 2009. The first version would swing for about 10 minutes, without added energy, after being started. The latest version swings for fully twice that, as the embedded video—all twenty-two minutes of it—thoroughly demonstrates. I haven’t seen any info about the design changes required to achieve this level of performance, unfortunately.
Over at Made by Joel, the eponymous author’s son just acquired a noble knight made by Lego with a moveable arm for pretend sword-fighting. Not one to be excluded, Joel made his own version from wood, and the two staged an epic battle on video.
Add a layer of physical security to your USB drive data with this beautifully designed and machined thumb drive inside a cryptex-style combination lock cylinder, from Russian Steampunk enthusiast Tarator.
Early on a recent Friday morning, a crane hoisted an old Airstream trailer onto the second floor of a building under construction in the Alphabet City section of Manhattan. The shiny aluminum trailer (circa 1958) is destined to become a recording studio inside of the Lower East Side Girls Club, currently just a concrete shell on Avenue D between 7th and 8th Streets. There was not much clearance to slip the 23-foot long trailer onto the second floor –only 20 inches– so the chilly autumn air was fraught with anxiety as the 2,000 lb. trailer rose off a flatbed truck.
