How-To: Make Conductive Ink
There are so many cool projects out there that use conductive ink, but where to get the ink? Now you can DIY that part, too!
Chemistry
In the Maker Shed: ShapeLock
The first time I used ShapeLock was my hotel room at Maker Faire: Bay Area. Ever since then I have been hooked to this wonderful material. But “what is it” you ask?
How-To: Make Your Own Aerogel
The folks at Aerogel.org are serious about it: The “Make” section of their exhaustive “open source aerogel” site will teach you how to make high-quality monolithic aerogel the way the pros do it, from building your our own supercritical drying apparatus (“manuclave” is their neologism), to mixing up the wet ingredients, to actually performing the […]
What is the World’s Strongest Plastic?
It’s a simplistic question, possibly even naive. Put it to a chemical engineer or a materials scientist, and she or he will almost certainly not come back with a single answer, but with (at least) two questions: What do you mean by “plastic?” Do thermosetting materials like epoxy count? What about polymers that are reinforced […]
How-To: PC Fan Stir Plate
Liam made this cool DIY variable speed stir plate for creating yeast starter for his homebrewed beer. To control the speed of the magnetic stirrer, he used an ATmega328 with the Arduino bootloader connected to a PC case fan. Liam even made use of the LEDs that you can sometimes find on fancy fans to […]
Argentium Silver
Human beings have been smithing silver for millennia. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that significant advances in silver metallurgy have been made as recently as the 1990s. Sterling silver, by definition, contains 92.5 wt% silver metal and 7.5% other metals, traditionally mostly copper. In 1998, however, Peter Johns of Middlesex University obtained a US […]
Fused Filament Printing with Water-Soluble Support
Veteran Thingiverse user Tony Buser has printed a model (intended to be an approximation of the fractal Hilbert curve) using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a support material. Once everything is printed and cooled, the PVA is dissolved away in a glass of water, leaving only the polylactic acid (PLA) model. This technique, when perfected, should […]
