In the comments on yesterday’s piece about Bolt Depot’s poster of fasteners, a reader, JamesB, wrote: I would encourage budding young fabricators to also take a look at the bolt grade charts and get an inexpensive universal thread gauge. For found fasteners, the grade markings help differentiate metric from SAE, and the thread gauge helps […]
Back in January, John Baichtal wrote about the Bolt Depot’s downloadable PDF posters [PDF, 520K] of common (and not so common) screws, bolts, washers, nuts, and other fasteners. But we thought, in light of our Mechanics Skill Set coverage, we’d remind our readers of them. Not only is the PDF great, but the Bolt Depot […]
The awesome automata artist Dug North does a quarterly column, “Dug’s Automata Tips, Techniques and Tricks,” on the Cabaret Mechanical Theater website. His latest installment outlines two different methods for making paper patterns for pinwheel gears. Pinwheel gears are relatively easy and fun to make and have various applications, such as above where they’re used […]
We had two giveaways close last night. In the Make: Arduino Getting Started with Arduino Kit giveaway, the winner is: Fractal LLC Thanks to all who participated (we had over 600 entries) and thanks to Maker Shed for providing this great kit. In the Mechanics Skill Set giveaway of Dustyn Roberts’ Making Things Move, the […]
MakerBot Industries blogger MakerBlock is working on a clockwork spider, and went the route of designing his own gears. He’s sharing his observations of designing and printing his own clockwork parts on the MakerBot blog. Here’s a sample: Don’t make parts too thin. The parts I printed tended to be designed too thin. If you […]
Aww, nuts! Learn to make your own from chocolate with this mechanical chocolate box tutorial by annahowardshaw.
Turns out it’s also possible to drill hexagonal hole using a very similar tool based on the Reuleaux pentagon. The video immediately above, again from jacquesmaurel, shows a tool he describes as a “Vika attachment,” mounted in a lathe, boring an hexagonal hole in a piece of stock. The video below, part of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, illustrates the process.
