I’m here at the MAKE magazine booth at Maker Faire Detroit, and across from us is the Learn to Solder area, run and manned by Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers. Mitch has brought tears to my eyes with his passion and enthusiasm for teaching folks to solder. I’ve witnessed him patiently and joyfully teaching people […]
My buddy Mike Cook of Portland, Michican, has been knapping for 30 years. It shows. And while I’d probably never dare to use such a knife for fear of damaging it, I’m still amazed at how inexpensive fine hand-knapped points and blades are compared to handmade steel knives. A traditional custom knifemaker with Mike’s experience would charge several times as much for his skill. I first ran across Mike’s work on FlintKnappers.com, which is a great all-around resource for those interested in the hobby.
Just ran across this fascinating little paper published in Nature back in 2002 by Gert J. Van Tonder, Michael J. Lyons, and Yoshimichi Ejima. In it, the authors apply a simple shape analysis to the layout of the 15 boulders in Japan’s most famous karesansui (or “Zen garden,” as they are often called in the West) at the RyÅan-ji temple in Kyoto. The technique they use is called “medial axis transformation,” which, by my understanding, basically means that they took the Voronoi diagram of the boulders in the garden as viewed from above. The paper’s authors explain their method with an elegant analogy:
Blow-molding (Wikipedia) is an thermoplastic forming process in which a hot polymer pre-form is injected with gas to press it against the inside of a hollow mold. It’s how most plastic bottles are made. Designer George Fereday got annoyed that the primarily-industrial process was so inaccessible and decided to build his own DIY version, which extrudes pre-melted polymorph plastic through a custom die attached to a normal caulking gun to create the hollow pre-form. There’s more detail over at Core77.
Ron Newman’s fantastic page on DIY room-temperature anodizing of aluminum parts was last revised in 2007, and looks like it may be significantly older than that. Ron’s selling a how-to book, now, and a bunch of anodizing supplies, from the same page, but to me it looks like there’s more than enough free info there already for a savvy person to figure it out for him- or herself. And while Ron’s set-up, pictured above, may look intimidating, it’s actually possible to do this without a lot of expensive equipment.
Ever wish you could build a radar system like the ones used on space missions and spy satellites?
The folks at Kolb Technology put together this series of tutorial videos (second part here) to show what goes into making models using their modeling clay.
