homemade tools

Rolling Tool Table from Stacked Tires

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this clever idea for recycling dead tires (or storing new ones) from Pittsburgh’s Joe Katrincik. It’s two smaller plywood circles for the base, a larger one for the top, 6 castors, 6 screw eyes / eyebolts, and 3 ratcheting tie-down straps. I bet if one were to counter-bore the top holes, a bit, and used T-nuts instead of hex nuts to secure the top eye bolts, one could avoid having the nuts sticking up above the work surface. If one thought it mattered.

Continue Reading December 21st, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan2

How-To: Mini Metal Lathe

Back in Plastics Month, we featured a simple shop-made plastics extruder built by Instructables user Random_Canadian. Now the arbitrary Canuck returns with this pint-sized metal lathe built with a 14″ piece of precision aluminum T-slot extrusion, and some characteristically resourceful salvage including an electric motor from a cordless weed trimmer, a variable speed switch from a cordless drill, and a tailstock center improvised from a countersink.

Continue Reading November 10th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan4

How-To: Homemade Plastic Bender

Cool vid from our pals at TAP Plastics showing how to build a strip heater, which is commonly referred to as a “plastic bender,” but really doesn’t do any bending in and of itself: It’s just a long skinny heating element that makes it easy to soften a sheet of plastic along a straight line, so you can bend it with your hands to an arbitrary angle, and/or against a jig for more precise control of the bend.

Continue Reading September 14th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan6

How-To: Homemade Plastics Recycler / Extruder

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

Continue Reading September 9th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan28

How-To: Large Homemade Vacuum Forming Machine

From James Bruton of XRobots.co.uk. James’s take on the familiar vacuum forming machine uses a three-layer MDF sandwich for the vacuum box and forming table, with a vacuum cleaner hose connected at the bottom. His heating system is novel, in my experience, using an off-the-shelf quartz room heater at the bottom of an MDF “chimney” lined with aluminum foil reflectors.

Continue Reading September 8th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan11

Milling Machine Made Entirely From Lego

OK, almost entirely: The actual cutting is done by a metal drill bit. Everything else, however, is Lego system elements. It looks like the machine uses a “raster” type subtractive process, covering the surface of the block in a close-packed grid of holes, each of which is drilled to an appropriate depth to form the final surface contours.

Continue Reading August 19th, 2011 Sean Michael Ragan16

Cream-of-the-crop DIY Softbox Designs

Thanks to Flickr user Matt Jones for hipping me to Udi Tirosh’s recent homemade softbox design contest over on DIYPhotography.net. For those, like myself, who are unsure, a “softbox” or “soft box” is simply a diffuse lighting source for taking photos, commonly with a reflective interior and one or more diffusing panels that scatter the light and help prevent it from casting harsh shadows. The contest had seventy submissions, reportedly, and here you can read about Udi’s top 24.

Continue Reading June 27th, 2011August 31st, 2015 Sean Michael Ragan4