Open Source Drill Press
This beast — a hydraulic drill press powered by a 20hp engine, appears to be connected to the Global Village Construction Set project. [Via Pat]
mechanics
Sequencing Valve Controls Six Streams of Water
Rob Torcellini of Eastford, CT, built this valve for controlling water in his aquaponics system. I love all the clever mechanical tricks found inside! This is a sequencing / indexing valve that I designed a couple of years ago. This uses a pinching mechanism to stop the flow of water. It is able to pass […]
Kinetic Sculpture Manipulates Rare Earth Magnets
Dave Johnson’s magnet machine has a lot of fascinating details: This machine manipulates small spherical rare earth magnets. slicing one at a time from the end of a long chain, moving it around a bit, then dropping it back to re-connect at the tail end of the chain. It also demonstrates a little snippet of […]
Letterpress Sculpture Prints FREEDOM
Over on CRAFT, Katie Wilson has some exclusive comments from Oakland artist Shawn HibmaCronan, whose mechanical sculpture “The Press” is on display at Terminal 2 of the San Francisco International Airport until 2021. I’m guessing the lawyers put a rope around it when they saw those big potentially-finger-crushing gears, but Shawn talks about how important it was to design the mechanism to be operated by a single person. So it’d be cool if they actually let people operate it.
MakerBeam Building Sets Now On Sale
Remember MakerBeam, the T-slot variant that began as a Kickstarter project? MakerBeam is a Mini-T open-source building system. Mini-T is a miniature version of T-slot (a technology that is widely used for industrial automation, robotics and machine enclosures.) Not only is it small enough to work as a model building system, but it’s also precise […]
Open-sourced blueprints for civilization
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with […]
Now That’s A Knife!
Thanks to our commenters for pointing out that, contrary to my implication in Monday’s bolt-action spud gun post, Jeremy Cook—cool though his project certainly is—is not the first person to build a breech-loading potato cannon. Not by a long shot. (Heh, sorry.)
