Developed during the heydey of the telegraph, the Lineman’s splice is designed for connections that will be under tension. It is commonly claimed that, properly made, a Lineman’s splice is stronger than the wires of which it is composed. In any case, it is a time-proven method, and, coolest of all, one of NASA’s Required Workmanship Standards. To wit…
Jonathan Hudson is an artist who specializes in recycled materials. “Girl Put Your Records On” is a female form sculpted from vinyl records. From his site:
Educated in the field of science I am constantly experimenting and exploring new approaches to my subject matter. My intentions are to create well-crafted works of art that visually speak to the viewer and evoke an emotional response. When possible I try to use recycled materials and repurpose them for something other than a landfill. As a Biologist it is disturbing to note the rate of devastation our species is inflicting on our planet. Recycled/Repurposed Art is at least one step in the right direction.
This is a wonderful collection of black-and-white newsreel footage, assembled by the company that invented the newsreel, showing a montage of early helicopter prototypes in all their wacky and frequently-terrifying glory. It’s a highlight reel, about two minutes long, and the various clips that went into it are indexed, annotated, and available for watching in […]
My old pal, Bay Area shutterbug Billy Baque, has a passion for the handmade, low-tech, all-in-one cameras-plus-darkrooms used by street photographers around the world. The so-called Cuban Polaroid is a typical example—a wooden box with a light-tight sleeve for the photographer’s arm at one end and a lens on the other. Billy describes the typical […]
Listen to your iPhone loud and clear with this vintage WWII era air raid siren conversion. Austin’s Chase and Scout preserved the speaker’s industrial vibe while updating it for modern playback. You can connect pretty much anything with a standard 1/8″ headphone jack to the recessed amplifier and 6″ powered speaker for a unique listening […]
Dennis Manarchy seeks to capture these “Vanishing Cultures” before they disappear, using his handmade 35′ long, 12′ tall, and 8′ wide camera, whose bellows and body resemble an old view camera.
If you like giant machines—and who really doesn’t?—don’t miss Tim Heffernan’s wonderful new feature over at Boing Boing: The magnificent machine pictured above is a closed-die forging press, one of the biggest in the world. (For reference, check out the men standing at its foot, down there on the left.) It and nine other huge […]
