Toolbox

Make a spooky jack-o’-lantern, quick

Make a spooky jack-o’-lantern, quick

Halloween’s almost upon us, and it’s time to carve up some jack-o’-lanterns. I have great respect for people who take hours to lavishly carve pumpkin masterpieces. I also have very little time to make my own pumpkins. My kids and I just want to get them carved, set a candle inside, and move on to roasting the seeds as quickly as possible. So I decided to forgo the knife and use a cordless Dremel Multi-Max oscillating tool to make quick work of Mr. O’Lantern. Follow the steps below and you too can crank out an army of chilling, thrilling Halloween pumpkins in no time.

Continue Reading John Edgar Park
How-To: Make cheap castable silicone from caulk

How-To: Make cheap castable silicone from caulk

Turns out, though, that mixing in some cornstarch accelerates the drying process; just how much depends on how much starch you add. The author recommends starting with a 1:1 mix. I’m not sure about his explanation that the process works because the hygroscopic starch carries moisture into the internal volume of the silicone, but in any case there are probably other additives that will accelerate the process as well as or better than cornstarch. You might even find one that’s not opaque and allows for translucent castings.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan17
Tools for Creativity theme

Tools for Creativity theme

For our last special theme of the year, we’ll be looking at the tools we all use to come up with the projects we pursue and how we manage them. We’ll be looking at physical tools, such as notebooks, drawing tools, whiteboards, and the like, but also, things like brainstorming and project-management software, and the […]

Continue Reading Gareth Branwyn24
Printable molds for casting monolithic button arrays of any size

Printable molds for casting monolithic button arrays of any size

Josef Prร…ยฏร…ยกa saw last week’s post about choosing a silicone for casting soft button arrays and pointed me to his printable mold for such arrays on Thingiverse. The model was produced in Clifford Wolf’s awesome OpenSCAD 3D modeling package, and the .scad script is available for download with the Thing. It has been parametrized to produce molds of button arrays having any number of rows and columns–all you have to do is change two values. The individual buttons are sized to match the SparkFun 2×2 button pad used on the monome, and also include backside recesses for LEDs.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan
Make a knife from an old saw blade

Make a knife from an old saw blade

Ever since I made my first ninja throwing star in metal shop class, I’ve always wanted to make my own knife. But I was put off by the notion of having to acquire the furnace, anvil, leather apron, and handlebar mustache requisite for forging a proper tempered blade. So, instead I decided to make a utility knife by cutting out a pattern from a circular saw blade, using my Dremel Rotary Tool.

Continue Reading John Edgar Park4