A while ago MAKE did a post on A Beginning Engineer’s Checklist from the PIClist site. And while I love these kind of lists, it left me – as a mechanical engineering – feeling a little left out, with all the talk of chips and Ohm’s Law and power busses (oh my!). It also reminded […]
Alan Federman built our Da Vinci Reciprocating Gear project in MAKE Volume 24 (video above). He has a number of other cool working Da Vinci models, built in wood, on his YouTube channel. You can learn a lot about the basic mechanics of gears, cranks, screws, and other simple machines by looking at these devices […]
On the latest Make: Live, we had Dustyn Roberts, our mechanics mentor for the month, give us a tour of her Wind Lantern project, from her book Making Things Move. She’s also has put up the build on Make: Projects. It’s a fun introduction to vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWT), building a diode bridge rectifier circuit, […]
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/03/make-presents-the-oscilloscope.html
Oscilloscopes are surprisingly easy to use once you’ve located a few basic controls. They can provide newcomers with a whole new way to view the world of electronics & electricty – plus they look impressively cool/awesome while in use!
In response to my post yesterday on tap and die, one of our fave MAKE contributors, Ross Hershberger, posted a set of tips we thought should have its own post. Then, reader johngineer chimed in with his own excellent tips. We love getting this sort of intel from our community. Thanks, guys! First, Ross: Making […]
Taps and dies are the two tools you use for cutting threads into material around a hole (tap) and for cutting threads into a rod (die) for mating with that hole. The basics of how to do it are quite simple. All you need to know are a few steps and you need a tap […]
We have another installment from Dustyn Roberts’ wonderful book, Making Things Move. In the last chapter, we covered “Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines.” Today, we look at motors and motion with “Chapter 6: Eeny Meeny, Miny, Motion: Options for Creating and Controlling Motion.” In this chapter, Dustyn covers the basics of how motors work, DC […]
