As much as I enjoyed this unusual technical info from GeekDad contributor Roy Wood, I was disappointed to learn that not all 18,650 things you can do with an old laptop battery are specifically listed in the article. Moreover, by a truly amazing coincidence, “18650” turns out to be the part number for the most common size lithium-ion cell used in assembling laptop batteries.
As impressive as this bottle-cap self-portrait from artist Mary Ellen Croteau may be, I probably would not have chosen to mention her piece “CLOSE,” here, if it weren’t for the interesting way that she has used sets of nested plastic bottle caps and bottle-cap liners to achieve a much deeper color palette than would’ve been possible using bottle caps without the nesting trick. Clever!
This is an easy and fairly well-known trick, especially since Mark blogged the work of Dominic Wilcox on Boing Boing back in 2004. The methods circulating on the web generally favor the use of an oven to melt the guys together, and while that’s certainly less labor-intensive, it generates a bunch of foul-smelling fumes in your kitchen. The oven method applies indiscriminate heat, which tends…
Instructables user Gonzolo Rojo Aguirre shows us how to build a reproduction “Gonk” droid from the original Star Wars sand crawler scene using bits ‘n’ pieces from IKEA. Text en español, but si no habla, you can get the gist from the photos, and of course Google translate.
Sure, the world’s full of unusual clocks, both analog and digital, but this unusual design from Instructables user duckcrazy caught my eye for the many clever ways in which it makes the most of some common materials. The case is made from carefully-chosen 2-liter soda bottles, and the clock itself from a pair of CDs, a couple of print-and-fold paper cylinders, and an inexpensive analog clock movement. It’s an entry in Instructables currently-ongoing Clocks Challenge.
To quote Sean Bonner: “The value of something like this is pretty obvious.” It’s the work of pseudonymous blogger Freehand Profit of The Hip Hop Nerd, and was created to promote StarWarsRemix.com, a collaborative site involving Noah Scalin, Mica Scalin, Emma Beddows, and Scott Walker
Admittedly, “art” may be, ah, stretching it a bit, but hot-pulling scrap styrene model sprue over an open flame to make plastic rods of various thicknesses is a classic technique in plastic model-building. The resulting material can be as thin as a human hair, and commonly finds use in scale modelling as antenna aerials, wire, bolt heads, etc.
