Homemade medium format camera
Peter Johansson is building a medium-format film camera. Like, from scratch. He’s about 80% done and has done a wonderful job documenting the build. [Thanks, Billy!]
Made On Earth
Pac-Man pumpkins
Reader Dave Adams submitted this cool Pac Man pumpkin display, complete with ghosts, dots, and fruit. Shown immediately above under regular and UV light. [Thanks, David!]
Minimalist nativity set
Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week in the blogosphere. I’m moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel.
The gravity-powered xylophones of Charles and Ray Eames
901 documents the dismantling of the offices of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames following Ray’s death in 19XX. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.
The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.
The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15′ tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.
Humongous treehouse
That’s no treehouse, that’s a foresthouse! The Worlds Greatest TreeHouse
World’s smallest model train set? – seems likely!
Wow! David K. Smith has made what seems a shoo-in for the title of World’s smallest model train – This is a Z scale model of an N scale train layout–a model of a model. And it works. I built it to sit in the window of a Z scale hobby shop on my “real” […]
“SuperFoam” block collapses into chair under weight
I got jealous of Matt’s recent “SuperFoam” chair post and had to find one of my own. This one is from a Taiwanese design student named Yu-Wing Wu. The voids are non-random, being carefully designed to collapse into the shape of an armchair when you sit on the thing, which in its resting state looks more like a giant block of tofu than a chair.