Makers

What do YOU call these things?

What do YOU call these things?

I use this tool all the time, but rarely have I ever heard any two people refer to it by the same name. “Wire cutters” is what I called them growing up, but since then I have heard “diagonal cutters,” “diagonal pliers,” “diags,” “side cutters,” “side cutting pliers,” “snips,” “snippers,” “dog-nips,” the easily-misinterpreted “strippers,” and the downright offensive “nips” and “dikes” (which apparently upsets Dutch people for some reason). So I’m starting a collection. Have I missed anything? What do you call them?

Revolutions in Model Making conference

Revolutions in Model Making conference

The Association of Professional Model Makers (APMM) 2010 conference, “Revolutions in Model Making – Creating the Future Faster,” will be held on March 26-29, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Cambridge, MA. The conference’s keynote speaker is Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and author of FAB: The Coming Revolution on […]

Time-lapse teen-built trebuchet

In honor of both DIY Movie Making Month and our ongoing love affair with simple machines that hurl stuff, Jeff DelPapa, founder of NERDS (The New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society), sent us a link to this time-lapse video of a group of teens building a trebuchet. Jeff describes the video as “stone-simple…120x real-time, using a […]