Interesting homemade tool from Instructables user Random_Canadian. The melt chamber consists of a length of 3/4″ iron pipe, the piston head is an off-the-shelf socket wrench, and the piston rod is a socket extension. A temperature controller, a couple of eBay cartridge heaters, a few tufts of fiberglass insulation, and some odds ‘n’ ends make for a heating system. And a brass hose barb serves as the extrusion nozzle
Lately I’ve taken to finding morals in the stuff I post. Last time it was radically limiting your options to inspire more creative thinking. Today, I think, the lesson of this simple-but-striking assemblage is about paying close attention to your starting material. What features does it already have, when you walk up on it, that you can exploit?
More cool original content from Hack a Day, this time by Kevin Dady. He writes: “I was recently commissioned to make a device which uses a pretty large number display, and I went out shopping. The seven segment we liked best was still quite pricey, and would not fit our enclosure correctly anyway…”
If I may wax pedantic for a moment, here’s a rather striking example of the remarkable creativity that can result from radically limiting one’s options. “What is the coolest thing I make using all the myriad resources available in the world?” may be a stultifying proposition, but picking something ready to hand (“What is the coolest thing I can make from just this pile of paperclips?”) is a more manageable and, in my opinion, often a more interesting and enjoyable process.
New York entrepreneur John Vaccaro bought a bunch of Bernie Madoff’s expensive tailored clothing at the federal auction of Madoff’s property in November, 2010, and has resewn them into iPad covers, which he is selling (at rather luxurious prices) through his recently-launched clothing label Frederick James.
While I might be slightly squeamish about staying in Austrian Andreas Strauss’s open-to-the-public, semi-outdoor, pay-what-you-want dasparkhotel, I love the idea of using drain pipe sections as small outdoor structures.
Artist Brian Jewett made these modern-material versions of traditional coil baskets using garden hose, cable ties, and spicket handles. He has posted some after-the-fact photos and a written how-to over on Instructables, as part of last week’s Zip Tie Challenge.
