If you’ve ever tried to build a box from clear acrylic, you know how hard it can be to get good-looking joints between the panels. The folks at TAP Plastics have gotten pretty good at it, but even they admit that the basic slab-joint method “will not produce museum grade products.” This video was produced by the German firm…
A while back I did some experimentation with stewing plastic bags in canola oil and then pressing them into solid forms. The process I followed used this method for molding a self-lubricating replacement bushing on a washing machine. While the results were certainly interesting, they had a side-effect of being impregnated in the oil, leaving grease stains in their path forever.
I love clockwork things. (I’ve built a couple of clocks myself) and so I am seriously impressed by the work of Chris Raynerd over at the raynerd.co.uk site. He’s only 28 and has already managed to equip himself with some excellent machining skills.
There’s something about the process of joining two pieces of metal together that captures people’s excitement and curiosity. Outside of a romantic idea of welding masks, torches, and flying sparks, I had no idea what I was getting into. Now that I’ve taken a few classes, I’ve learned enough to distinguish the different types of welds, their uses, and the fact that I have a lot of practice in store before my welds are worth anything.
The very word means capable of being shaped, molded. Plastic is a cheap, durable, plentiful, extremely adaptable, and variable material that can be put to seemingly endless uses, from furnishings, building materials, and machine parts, to tools, weapons, vehicles, to now just about anything that can be extruded from a 3D printing head. The downside of its cheapness and ubiquity (not to mention the polluting nature of its manufacture) is that it leads to a profusion of waste material.
The requisite starting point for anything electronic โ you won’t get much blinking, buzzing, or processing done without a power supply!
Welding! Welding is a glorious, mystery-infused, thoroughly bad-ass way to stick things together. Welders move in their own cloud of mythos and danger- they are dirtier, tougher, and sexier than any other kind of maker, and the things they build are big and strong and hold our world together. This positive stereotype permeates at all levels of pop culture: if a character is introduced while welding, you immediately know that they will be some kind of blue-collar superhero, or some kind of cliched contradiction- the welder quoting Hegel after winning the bar fight, or the classic trope of seeing a welder at work, and then they flip off the helmet and OMG IT IS A GIRL! A GIRL WELDING!
