One of our new members at the Hack Factory is Ray Connors, a locksport aficionado. He makes his own lockpicks, which are sold in pairs, double-sided rake/tensors. Also, I really liked his method for storing them, in a safety pin laced through a pen spring. Wearable lockpicks!
The clever copy some bright marketeer wrote for SparkFun’s Heaterizer XL-3000 is turning into a pretty awesome viral advertisement for the product, and for SparkFun itself. [via Boing Boing]
We asked Make: contributor Len Cullum to contribute some pieces on understanding basic tools and techniques. Here, he explains the tools used for laying out woodworking projects. — Gareth Accurate layout work is the critical first step to a successful project. Without precise, repeatable marks, it is very difficult to get everything to come together […]
A commenter on Monday’s post about Rob Ives’ free downloadable resistor color wheel computer pointed us to the Japanese-language site of Ikkei Electronics, which provides this PDF created in 2007, and apparently dated to 1976, showing this cool hand-drawn-and-lettered version of the same idea. [Thanks, ikkei!]
Make: Projects contributor Josh Burroughs has posted an excellent handsaw restoration how-to. Why bother to take the time to restore an old, rusty saw? Josh explains: Modern saws found at the big box home centers usually have induction hardened teeth that can’t be sharpened – they are meant to be thrown away when dull. They […]
OK, so, it’s not really that hard to learn to read a resistor without a special tool, but ever since I saw the free downloadable nuclear bomb effects computer I have had a soft spot for these circular slide rules. And this one from Rob Ives might make a cool gift for a young maker to get him or her painlessly over the hump. [Thanks, Rob!]
I have been interested in picking locks since I picked my first lock in science class one day during 7th grade. Last year, I purchased a number of lock picks from various manufacturers (SouthOrd, Rytan and Peterson) and found that, although good in their own right, I could not get the right “feel” from them. […]
