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 […]
In the comments on yesterday’s piece about Bolt Depot’s poster of fasteners, a reader, JamesB, wrote: I would encourage budding young fabricators to also take a look at the bolt grade charts and get an inexpensive universal thread gauge. For found fasteners, the grade markings help differentiate metric from SAE, and the thread gauge helps […]
Back in January, John Baichtal wrote about the Bolt Depot’s downloadable PDF posters [PDF, 520K] of common (and not so common) screws, bolts, washers, nuts, and other fasteners. But we thought, in light of our Mechanics Skill Set coverage, we’d remind our readers of them. Not only is the PDF great, but the Bolt Depot […]
The awesome automata artist Dug North does a quarterly column, “Dugโs Automata Tips, Techniques and Tricks,” on the Cabaret Mechanical Theater website. His latest installment outlines two different methods for making paper patterns for pinwheel gears. Pinwheel gears are relatively easy and fun to make and have various applications, such as above where they’re used […]
Hone your woodworking skills while creating a useful shop tool by creating these simple, lovely, and very useful Japanese “low horses.”
This week I’ll show you some more metalworking techniques including files, rotary abrasives, and how to make a ball-head rivet with a butane torch. http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/08/craft_video_intro_to_metalwork.html
