For me, Concrete Month has been about discovering all kinds of amazing uses for a material that, before, had seemed pretty mundane. But among engineers, that sentiment—that concrete can do so much more than we normally ask of it—is not new. Case in point: the concrete canoe phenomenon.
Editor’s Note: When we were putting together our Make: Ultimate Kit Guide, we wanted to highlight the makers of the awesome kits we reviewed as much as possible. Our 96 pages quickly became chocked full of valuable info, and some of the longer profiles had to be cut down for print. Here is the full […]
In the 19th century, three ancient Egyptian granite obelisks—each weighing north of 200 tons—were shipped from Egypt to London, Paris, and New York. Postcolonial-era questions about whether ancient Egyptian obelisks shouldn’t perhaps be left in Egypt aside, how it was done is quite an interesting story. This, BTW, is just the first of what I expect will be many gems from my newly-discovered treasure trove, No Tech Magazine, a sister publication to Kris de Kecker’s Low Tech Magazine, which we rave about here all the time.
Check out this amazing 18′ canoe made from a single sheet of plywood. Resembling a South American “pipante” dugout canoe, Finnish boat builder Hannu Vartiala designed and built his craft, “dug”, in an attempt to correct balancing issues he had with a previous design. He’s also put up instructions on his site so you can build your own. It sure is an impressive example of maximum use of materials with minimal effort.
Not to be confused with this Lego ship in a Lego bottle. Something very like this stunt has actually been on my personal to-do list for about six months now (well, I was gonna build a Lego spaceship in a glass bottle), but I kept putting it off. “Jeremy Moody built the first Lego ship inside a bottle!” is the headline over at Brothers Brick. Oh, that stings! [Thanks, Rachel!]
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, from user huebner5000. He quotes an unnamed source:
This Cuban chug arrived Wednesday, December 16th, 2009. The chug held 17 Cubans who are now legal U.S. citizens. The chug, we were told, left Cuba at 5am December 14th and landed at Dry Tortugas at 2am December 16th.
It’s all made from scrap metal and junk. The hull, reportedly, is flattened corrugated roofing material. There’s one more picture here.
Details about the device itself are scanty, other than that the clam-sized machine shown in the photo “is supported by a large apparatus of pressure regulators, pistons and more that control such things as how hard the robot is pushed in each direction.” Which leads me to speculate that the prototype, as shown, is unpowered and operated remotely by pneumatics or hydraulics. They’re envisioning applications as a lightweight anchor that could burrow into or out of a sea- or lakebed on command.
