There are lots of ways to do this particular trick. You may have seen bottles “cut” using a bucket of ice water, a string soaked in fuel and set alight, a hot narrow gauge resistive wire, or some combination of the above. I’ve tried all of these ways, at one point or another, with varying […]
In this project, we’ll make battery packs essentially for free. If you need a lot, make a lot. If you need more voltage, add on more cells with couplers. If participants and students in your workshop or class all make their own, they can do it together, maybe even doing a manufacturing project to create many for future use.
What’s that you say? You don’t need an 8-inch diameter snow globe? Especially not one featuring a vignette of Al Pacino as Tony Montana in the climactic battle scene from Brian De Palma’s Scarface? I say you’re wrong: You need one of these. You need one so badly you don’t even know it yet. This […]
About a year ago Marc linked to the original version of this tutorial on my personal page. This is a revised version with more detailed and user-friendly instructions. The idea here is to use a simple, inexpensive concrete mixture to cast decorative containers using common trash items as sacrificial mold elements. Styrofoam packing inserts, in […]
The following article is reprinted from my old personal-tech website, Street Tech. I thought these vibrobots would make perfect family projects for the “Teach Your Family to Solder” MAKEcation. If you have kids too young to solder, you could build a mint-tin vibrobot [PDF] with them (which doesn’t require soldering) and these solar-powered vibrobots with […]
I really heart coiled cords. I think coiling is a very elegant way of dealing with the problem of unsightly slack cables, and often I find myself wishing that this or that appliance had come with a coiled cord. Replacement cords that are factory-coiled can usually be purchased and installed (if necessary), but that may be an unnecessary expense because, with some simple tools, it is easy to coil a straight cord yourself.
Several months ago, Becky covered my remake of a low quality trash bag holder I bought through a SkyMall-esque catalog. This is how I explained the project at the time: Trash cans have always sort of annoyed me. They take up so much space, especially if, like me, you favor large cans to minimize the […]
