Month: August 2010

Gingery-style homemade metal lathe builds

Gingery-style homemade metal lathe builds

Throw a stone at any gathering of makers, and you’re likely to hit somebody who owns a set of DIY-savant Dave Gingery’s classic books on building your own machine shop by casting scrap aluminum, melted in a charcoal-powered bucket furnace, into sand molds formed by wooden patterns. I’ve owned a set myself, for more than a decade, and “at least starting on the lathe,” which is the first tool in the series, has been on my someday list since the first time I ever saw the books advertised in Lindsay Technical Books’ classic ad in Popular Science.

Walking table

Walking table

The quintessentially Dutch, singularly functional, aesthetically innovative, and yet alluringly strange table in question is by designer Wouter Scheublin. “Walking Table,” as it is cleverly named, is human-powered, incorporating a mechanical linkage that converts gentle lifting and pushing of the top into oscillations of the legs that move the table across the floor with little effort. [via NOTCOT]

Zipper boat!

Zipper boat!

Yup. Somebody–specifically Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki–went to the trouble of building a motorboat shaped like a zipper pull just for the sake of the aerial sight gag of its wake suggesting a parting zipper. And just for the record, this is clearly a jacket-zipper-pull motorboat, not a pants-zipper-pull motorboat, so let’s not have any off-color jokes about what strange creatures might be surfacing in its wake. [via Dude Craft]