The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
Sculptor, kinetic artist, and longtime MAKE pal Alan Rorie is back with this beautiful “pressure door” built for a “Nautilus” art car project commissioned from San Francisco art collective Five Ton Crane. The door locks and unlocks via RFID, and the huge, four-foot diameter mechanical iris in its center is motorized. Rorie, who is a specialist in iris apertures, also built four smaller irising windows for the car’s body.
Last Thursday, I attended the launch party for The BurdaStyle Sewing Handbook at the beautiful event space at Housing Works Bookstore in NYC. I was so excited to be invited, and I really enjoyed checking out the book, talking to some of the project designers, and hanging out in a room filled with other people […]
I love this Arduino project enclosure by Oomlout, who created bendable plywood by emulating a technique they saw Snijlab employ, where small slits are lasered into the plywood making it bendable. Oomlout’s site has the DXFs or you can grab them on Thingiverse.
Founded in 1906 in South Bend, Indiana, South Bend Lathe, at one time, controlled almost half of the U.S. domestic metalworking lathe market. South Bend did a lot of things right, to earn their market share and reputation, and one of the smartest was to produce clear, well-illustrated, low-cost instructional materials describing not just how to set up and run their tools, but how to use them to perform all kinds of basic and advanced machining operations.
Brown University Engineering and Visual Arts lecturer Ian Gonsher’s Generative Construction Toy is a set of snap together shapes that you can cut out on a laser cutter and use as building blocks to design and build compound three dimensional objects. It’s like an evolving desktop fab version of tinker toys or LEGO, but more organic. What’s most interesting about the GCT is that you are encouraged to modify and create your own shapes through an iterative process of design and play.
Weighing in at eighty pounds, the DW734 is the smaller of two bench-top planers that DeWalt offers. You can pick one up from a big box store for around $360-$400. The 15A, 120V electric motor spins the three cutting blades at 10,000 RPM and the automatic feed system uses two rubber drums to grab the workpiece and steadily feed it through the blades at 96 cuts per inch. The blades are reversible and produce a nice finish, however due to the mounting hole configuration they are very difficult to re-sharpen. You can buy a pack of three replacement blades for around $45 online.
Quick, handy video tutorial from Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin of tiny workshop, demonstrating a fast method of centering a piece of round stock in a 4-jaw chuck using a magnetic-mount dial indicator and a pair of chuck keys. If you’ve never seen this operation before, Jeremy’s video makes it clear and simple to understand. [Thanks, Jeremy!]
