The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the industrial arts from metal and woodworking to CNC machining and 3D printing.
To me, the real signs of spring are blooming bulb flowers and wind (there’s a lot of wind in New Mexico in March, let me tell you!). So when I was sent a copy of the kid crafts book What Shall We Do Today? by Catherine Woram, I was particularly interested in the homemade wind […]
This is a video, from YouTuber OliKills, showing two guys using a thermal lance (Wikipedia), also called a “thermic lance” or “burning bar,” to cut through a lump of concrete. It really gets going about 20 seconds in, and by the end of the video a white-hot stream of molten concrete “lava” is clearly visible running across the pavement.
When Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, offered a class titled “How to Make (almost) Anything,” he was surprised to find himself inundated by students. In particular, Gershenfeld was taken aback by the fact that these students weren’t taking the class for some sort of abstract research, or to fulfill an […]
These are the molds custom Lego armorer Will Chapman of BrickArms uses to make his gats. BrickArms was recently mentioned in Chris Anderson’s genre-defining Atoms Are The New Bits article in WIRED, cited as an example of an amateur turning his or her hobby into a profession. I wrote Will to find out more about […]
Forum user LeversFulcrumsLoads has amassed a large quantity of leftover Altoids tins, and is trying to think of something to do with them.
Every other week, CRAFT’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Craft: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next. By Lindsey North, projects intern The trend now — and I love it — is recycled accessories: earrings made of bottle caps full of resin, belts made from candy […]
While we’re on the subject of great Maker-movies, I feel obliged to mention Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which is a survey of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose métier is finding beauty in the midst of environments radically altered by human activity. If you watch no further than the first shot, you will have seen one of the most amazing takes I’ve ever seen in any movie, ever: It’s an eight minute tracking shot of a Chinese factory floor that just goes on and on and on, and you keep thinking “This place can’t be that big; this shot has to end soon.” And it doesn’t. And the images of the ship-breaking beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, are like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game. Beautiful and frightening.
