Month: August 2009

Mark’s fabbed violin

Mark has been working on variations of this electric violin for a few months now at the Boston Fab Lab. For Friday’s Learn 2 Teach Project Exposition, he got it into a playable condition and demonstrated it to visitors at the South End Technology Center. He used Open Office Draw to design the files, and […]

Full scale matchstick car

Full scale matchstick car

From the picture quality, this looks like an oldie but a goodie. This full scale car replica was made with almost a million matchsticks. Crazy! More: Matchstick art MatchstickMan – The incredible Matchstick Uke Sydney Harbour Bridge made of matchsticks Eiffel tower made of matches

The pitch drop experiment

The pitch drop experiment

In 1927 Dr. Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland heated a sample of petroleum pitch, also called bitumen, and poured it into a glass funnel, with a sealed neck, set in a ring stand. Three years later, in 1930, he broke the neck off the funnel and set it aside. It took eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall. The experiment has been running continuously ever since, and has produced a total of eight drops to date. The man shown in the photograph is Dr. John Mainstone, who is the experiment’s current custodian.

Valkyrie: $100 Arduino based CNC

A homemade CNC machine build using mostly off the shelve parts.The first one aka “The beast” had a lot of precision issues due to play in most parts which in turn was caused by mostly bad cutting. Also one of the biggest problems was that when I have build it I did not think to allow later adjustments to be done. So this time almost every part of it allows for some adjustments. It is also easier to build due to the different design.