From Dutch designer Wouter Scheublin, who made a big splash in 2010 with his Walking Table. This pull-back-to-wind Toy Car, machined in stainless steel and bronze, with matching walnut box, was produced in a limited edition of twenty, and is still available in laser-sintered nylon, though it isn’t cheap. [Thanks, Billy Baque!] More:Seriously Overengineered MousetrapVery, […]
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In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened their famous Machine Art exhibition, featuring industrial objects like gears, bearings, and propellers displayed solely for their aesthetic value. The embedded video is excerpted from avant-garde U.S. filmmaker Ralph Steiner’s Mechanical Principles, which was released only a year earlier, and is very much in the same […]
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Bruce Parker, former Chief Scientist and eleven-year veteran of NOAA’s National Ocean Service, wrote this fascinating article in the September issue of Physics Today. It covers the technical history
of the science of tide prediction leading up to the beautiful mechanical computers developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to quickly extrapolate recorded tide patterns into useful predictions, and goes on to explain how those computers were critical in planning the Normandy landings.
From Thingiverse user mattmoses. I cannot resist a good .GIF mechanism animation
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Idahoan Dean Williams used to make a living by repairing vintage mechanical cameras. If you’ve ever pulled your hair out trying to replace a small spring that hasn’t been manufactured since the factory was bombed by Göring’s Luftwaffe, you may be interested in his well-documented DIY method. Dean’s trick for annealing them inside a wad of steel wool in a toaster oven is worth a click all by itself. His entire site, in fact, will likely be of interest to those who appreciate close mechanical work.
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All the primary source material here appears to be in Japanese, in which I am sadly illiterate, but word on the street is that this is a college-level student engineering project. It’s called Skeletonics, and I want to describe the technology as a “passive exoskeleton,” because it does not have any servomechanisms and just amplifies the speed and reach of the wearer’s natural movements. That would be opposed to an “active exoskeleton,” which, you know, would be one that actually adds power to a movement. I dunno what good it may be, but it sure looks like fun. If nothing else, you could build one and sell rides in it at the county fair. [via Hack a Day]
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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.
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