The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
Chicago’s American Machine Tools Corporation buys, sells, ships, and repairs heavy machine tools all over the world. They also maintain a curriculum of free, online, non-brand-specific operator education materials, including the best general How to Use a Milling Machine page I’ve seen. There are no videos, but personally I prefer old-fashioned text and diagrams for this purpose. If you are interested in movies, however, check out MIT’s Introduction to the Mill.
Every Third Thursday the employees of Signal Snowboards get together to get creative with board design and materials, and generally hack on gear at the factory. Recently they laboriously toiled over one of the more creative snowboard designs I’ve seen: the iShred.
Nikolaus Gradwohl of Vienna, Austria, built a cozy little workbench for his flat: Since space is very rare in my flat I made a small workbench that is hidden in an ikea-shelf. I combined a folding table and an ikea shelf. Then I added some small cabinets with drawers and an adjustable lamp. I had […]
There was no corpse in the coffin because it is one day going to be used by Bader herself, who has no plans to kick the bucket anytime soon. Ever since reading a Twin Cities newspaper account of a course titled “Bury Yourself In Your Work: Build Your Own Casket,” she wanted to go the DIY route for her casket.
At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from “hobby” machine tools are those used to build ships and power plants. I have no technical details about the lathe shown above, but the photograph was taken in 1957 or 1958 at the Doxford Engine Works in Pallion, England. If you like it, don’t miss the gallery over at Ships Nostalgia about English shipwrights William Doxford and Sons. It’s chockablock with absolutely gorgeous, amazing photographs of giant men building giant machines with giant tools.
Vancouver-based makers eatART have been working away at their most recent creation, Titanoboa, a 50 ft mechanical snake. They displayed the work-in-progress at this year’s Vancouver Mini Maker Faire, and it’s come a long way.
A three-part series from Mikey over at MachinistBlog.com. Mikey has been a machinist for 15 years, and has come ’round to the belief that high-speed steel (HSS) cutters, rather than the pricier, lower-maintenance, carbide-tipped bits, are the way to go on a hobby-sized metalworking lathe. He also makes a compelling argument for using a belt sander, instead of the traditional bench grinder, for making, shaping, and sharpening HSS lathe tools.
