Use your drill press in reverse to make perfectly centered holes
Vik Olliver put up a great tutorial about how you can successfully drill down the middle of a shaft using a standard drill press and cheap vise.
Toolbox
Toolbox: First aid
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 […]
Thermal lance is every bit as awesome as it sounds
This is a video, from YouTuber OliKills, showing two guys using a thermal lance (Wikipedia), also called a “thermic lance” or “burning bar,” to cut through a lump of concrete. It really gets going about 20 seconds in, and by the end of the video a white-hot stream of molten concrete “lava” is clearly visible running across the pavement.
Ian Ross’s workbench and shed
Australian reader Ian Ross sent in pictures of his awesome workbench, which packs some interesting gear like nixie-tube test equipment. It is the disorganised chaos of over 30 years of collecting discarded electronic devices. Some of the test instruments use lovely Nixie tubes and I also have a flat screen telly so I can escape […]
Amusing warning sign for CNC tools
So I don’t want to go too far down the “funny warning signs” rabbit hole (you could get a whole blog out of that, I think), but a commenter on last Tuesday’s “Big Scary Laser” warning sign post linked to this design, of hers, for a warning sign to go on robotic power tools. I get a huge kick out of the giant menacing robot with the buzz-saw hand. [Thanks, Jennifer!]
Grant Hutchinson’s workshop slash server room
I’m a big fan of workshops, the messier the better, and this one definitely fits the bill. I especially love the old school Macs that Grant has turned into servers. The super old ones are an 8500 and 9600 working as web servers, while a relatively modern G4/450 dualie serves as a file server. But […]
Mark Tilden’s workshop with a view
Most home workshops have you looking at garage walls or cement bricks. Mark Tilden, father of BEAM robotics, built himself a sweet setup high above the streets of Hong Kong. Having spent most of my lab life staring at basement walls or security bars, recently sorted myself a home lab 600 feet high overlooking Kowloon […]
