Love Letter to Plywood, by Tom Sachs
Sculptor Tom Sachs made this wonderful seven-and-a-half minute film about his loved for the wondrous properties of plywood.
materials
MAKE Asks: Your Favorite Building Material
Make: Asks is a new weekly column where we ask you, our readers, for responses to maker-related questions. We hope the column will spark interesting conversation and that we’ll get to know more about each other.
This week’s question: What is your favorite building material, and why?
How-To: Work with Shape-Memory Alloy
Shape-memory alloy (SMA), metal that changes shape when heated to an activation temperature can be used in all sorts of projects.
Epic Soft Circuit Roundup
In celebration of Advanced Materials Month here on MAKE, I’m bringing you the most fabulous wearable electronics using innovative conductive materials like fibers and paints. This is the roundup to end all other roundups; it showcases 22 of my favorite projects. Above: Soft Circuit Musical Hats
Skill Builder 2012: Materials
Last year we launched our Skill Builder series on the site, a monthly educational program exploring core maker skills (electronics, woodworking, metalworking, etc.). We think we got off to a good start and want to continue building on that content. But this year, we’re approaching the skill sets from a different angle: The materials that go into what you build.
Homemade Silica Aerogel
Aerogels are fascinating materials, with lots of interesting and, frankly, amazing properties, but they are not easy to make. These days, industrial manufacture with an eye towards commercial applications, primarily as thermal insulators, is bringing the price down some, at least for granules, but larger pieces still cost around $50 US per cubic inch. Ben Krasnow, impressively, has made his own…
What Carbonated Acrylic Plastic Looks Like
As I wrote about a month ago, one of the many unusual phenomena Ben Krasnow has produced in his garage is supercritical CO2. As you may recall, Ben machined a custom acrylic pressure vessel so he could get (and give) a good look at a state of matter that most of us have little experience of. Since then Ben has inadvertently had a chance to observe another extremely unusual effect: the carbonation of solid acrylic.
