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 […]
In the wake of the Japanese disaster trifecta, I contacted our pal Francesco Fondi, of Wired Italy’s Otaku News and Hobby Media, to make sure he was OK (in Tokyo). He’s fine. He also sent us a link to a piece he’d done on Wired.it about DIY Geiger counters. It looked interesting, so I asked […]
I posed the question recently about how to remove rust from this toolbox full of neglected tools. I got lots of suggestions in the comments recommending different methods. I’ve decided to try out as many of them as possible. First up: soda.
Don’t let the advertising-quality photography fool you: This is the work of an individual maker (specifically Matt of Wood&Faulk) who wants to share it with you just for the pleasure of sharing. Well, that and the traffic, probably. We all <3 the traffic. [via NOTCOT]
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 […]
