The Melting Pot is an older ‘visualizer’ project, however it was way ahead of it’s time. Developed back in 2001 by Itiro Siio and Noyuri Mima, it’s purpose is to bridge the physical distance between a team that is scattered across an office building together by bringing the them together using sweet, sweet coffee.
Now here’s a perfect example of why I love the MAKE community. In response to my earlier post about the possibility of modern mechanical gate openers, reader MichaelLubke went out and took these photos (1,2,3) of a real live working mechanical gate near his ranch. What’s more, he ran down the original patent on the gate’s design! This patent, US number 3,163,947, was issued to Mr. Alvin E. Gandy of Eden, TX, in the year of Our Lord nineteen-hundred and sixty-five. His invention, known as the “Gandy Slide-A-Way,” is activated by the weight of one of your vehicle’s tires on a short steel ramp built into the driveway right in front of the gate. I wonder how many of these were ever made?
MAKE subscriber Doug took up the challenge to re-make the word clock he saw here a few weeks ago, and wrote in to share his project with us.
I like the looks of these custom BBQ appliances by Steve Stealey of BARRELSMOKERS.net.
I just built this nifty little tea timer from a recycled toaster. The timer is a trickle-charged capacitor that steals power from the magnet, eventually allowing the spring to throw the arm back up after the 1 to 3 minute brew-time selected on the dial.
Lovely hard drive clock. Unfortunately, the text is all in Polish, but you can derive a lot of the details from the hi-res images. HDDClock [via BB Gadgets]
Thinking about mechanical means for auto-opening a fence gate.
