Make it Anywhere With a Mobile Lab
Steve Roberts, the “high-tech nomad,” shows you how he built his mobile lab and makerspace.
Toolbox
BrickLink is like Craigslist for Legos
Have you ever seen any of the amazing custom Lego work proliferating on the internet these days and wondered, “Where did they get exactly the bricks they needed to build that thing?” Sourcing parts can be especially difficult if your model, like Flickr user Legohaulic’s Great White Nautilus, shown above, includes lots of unusual elements. As far as I know, there is, as yet, no site or service in the world that will let you upload a list of Lego elements, in exactly the colors and quantities you want, and then price, pack, and ship you an order containing exactly those elements. It seems like a great idea, but the logistical problems of making that happen are enormous. BrickLink, however, is the next-best thing. Thousands of private Lego resellers from around the world have shops there selling kits, manuals, and individual elements indexed by official Lego catalog number. If you’re sourcing parts for a particular model, you still have to do some manual legwork running down the particular combination of BrickLink sellers that optimize price, availability, seller location, seller minimum order values, and so forth for the items on your list, but it’s still an incredible resource.
John Dillinger’s fake escape pistol
I have often opined that truly creative problem solving comes from limiting one’s options, rather than expanding them. Which is why prisoner’s inventions fascinate me so much. (If you’ve not had a chance to browse Angelo’s Prisoners’ Inventions book, BTW, I highly recommend it–it’s not about shivs or improvised weapons, but about how prisoners make game pieces, heat water, control the climate in their cells, etc., etc. using only the odds and ends they are permitted by, or can slip past the attention of, the state.) Compare an object like this prop handgun, which was reportedly used by John Dillinger in his escape from the Crown Point, Indiana Jail in 1934, to, say, a modern-day toothbrush handle, or a Nike sneaker, designed by a professional working with a CAD-CAM system, industrial machine tooling, and a smorgasboard of rainbow-colored polymers and elastomers, most of which add no functional value at all, and are employed just to make a product stand out from competitors on the shelf. Granted, an escaping prisoner and a product designer have wildly different goals, but if asked “which is doing more creative, original problem-solving,” I know how I’d answer.
2-ton Husqvarna DXR-310 demolition robot
Robot uprising jokes are getting a bit stale, I suppose, so I’ll pass on the obvious Terminator allusions this time. Plus this hulking tracked demolition machine from Sweden’s Husqvarna Construction Products is remote controlled, not autonomous, and so is really more a giant R/C car on steroids, with a massive jackhammer arm, than it is a true robot. Still, “awesome” comes to mind. [via BotJunkie]
Toolbox: The Homeliest Tool in the Shed
In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange, or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your […]
Calling all homely tools
For this week’s Toolbox column, I want to cover “homely tools,” those “nothing special” items in your toolbox that you couldn’t live without — that awesome pair of scissors you got from your grandmother that you use all the time, the hammer who’s balance, weight, and grip you always appreciate whenever you wield it, the […]
DIY shoulder rig for DSLR video, with clever focus puller
In this video and at this site, annoyingly good-looking Swedish videographer Jonathan Bergqvist details the construction of this clever shoulder-mount device for shooting video with a DSLR. Designed by Jonathan and his father Erik, the rig itself is made out of birch and includes a manual focus puller, actuated by twisting the left handle, that is hacked together from R/C control rod parts and a hose clamp.
