What IF… Festival: Don’t miss the geeky gadgets, DIY demos, cool experiments, new technologies, hands-on learning, and live performances! September 7th, 10am-4pm in Colorado Springs, CO.
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This weekend, my buddy Jon came over, and we used my garage chem-lab to silver-plate some brass hinge leaves for some fancy jewelry boxes he’s making. I had never electroplated anything before, and have been curious about the process since my undergraduate days. My impression, based on my survey courses, was that electroplating is messy and dangerous—one of those jobs it’s usually best to contract out to a speciality shop. Jon came prepared with a bucketful of supplies. He had the parts themselves, a benchtop power supply, a strip of stainless steel to serve as an anode, cotton plating pen tips, a strip of 0.999 silver to wrap around the pen tip and connect it to the PSU probe, copper wire to support and ground the parts during the plating operations, and three bottles of MIDAS-brand electroplating chemicals. (MIDAS, for the record, is Rio Grande’s house electroplating products brand.)
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Tomorrow is Toolsday here at MAKE, so you know what that means – a live Google+ hangout where we will be discussing our favorite tools and workspace essentials. The main topic of the hangout will be part finishing. We’ll discuss the tools and techniques required to protect and decorate your part with paint, varnish, anodizing, powder coating and more. Join us at 2pm PST/5 pm EST on the MAKE Google+ page or catch it later on the MAKE YouTube page.
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The American Chemical Society has a great two-minute video explaining the basic chemistry behind snowflake formation, including how each degree of temperature difference adds to the branches of the flake. Are no two snowflakes really alike? It depends on if we’re talking about big snowflakes or little ones. On a side note, the incredible snowflake […]
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Apparently, this is what happens when you microwave a bar of Ivory soap. It expands in a foam up to six times its original size.
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Dutch glass crasftman Ramon Vink runs a studio called Poelgeest Glass. Using modern lampworking techniques and tools, he makes scientific apparatus and artistic pieces like this Klein bottle, the forming of which he has documented in a series of five YouTube videos. The videos themselves are pretty raw, with minimal post-production and no narration, but taken altogether they do a good job of documenting not just the general process of forming a Klein bottle from stock glass tube, but the specific tools and skilled manipulations required for each operation.
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Launched this summer, Corning’s Willow Glass is an ultra-thin (0.1mm), flexible, roll-processable glass sheet intended for use in next-generation display devices. From an applications point of view, it offers the possibility of curved displays and/or interfaces that wrap around object or devices, and from a manufacturing point of view, the possibility of producing display devices using continuous “roll-to-roll” assembly, kind of like how bulk paper goods are processed.
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