Besides some top-notch bloggin’, the team at I Heart Engineering maintains a great catalog of interesting and hard-to-find tools, kits, parts, and other gear for makers. When these crazy-looking heavy-duty scissors by trending Japanese toolmongers Engineer Inc. first caught my eye, a few weeks back, I was not at all surprised to find that I Heart Engineering was the only place in the U.S. I could find them.
It’s Toolsday here at MAKE, and that means that we’re having a Hangout on Air. Join us 6pm PDT to talk about some of your favorite tools and to show off your workspace. If you’d like to join the live broadcast hangout, leave a comment on the Toolsday post on the +MAKE page. We will […]
Admittedly, there are lots of ratcheting screwdrivers in the world. Especially nowadays. But I love the Easydriver, and I suspect I always will, and not just for the warm glow of nostalgia the one from Dad’s toolbox evokes for me. The Easydriver, IMHO, is a classic of modern industrial design. It belongs in a nice coffee table book, somewhere…
I tend to do my fine-detail circuit work inside the house on my electronics workbench, and rougher work in my garage workshop. I have vises installed in both places, each chosen to suit the work: in the house I use a PanaVise Jr. Mini-Vise mounted on a tray base; in the garage it’s a heftier swivel vise bolted to my workbench. Now, PanaVise has turned things upside down by offering this new Vise Buddy Jr., which is a small, precision vise head that you can quickly clamp into your bigger bench vise.
Join us 6pm PDT on G+ to talk about some of your favorite tools and to show off your workspace.
A regular hacksaw frame is fixed to the blade at both ends. These restricted-access hacksaws, on the other hand, are fixed to the blade only at the back end, closest to your hand, and support the front end using a reciprocating, spring-loaded bar with a thin guide slot and a rubber shoe. The shoe rests up against the workpiece, during the stroke, and the blade moves back and forth through the guide slot, which keeps it from flexing away from the intended cutting path. The upshot is that, unlike a regular hacksaw frame, you can make cuts in stuff with almost zero backside clearance.
Our workstation is CNC-cut from half-inch plywood. It is rock-solid sturdy, yet comes apart easily for transport or modifications. It features a main computer bay with an optional door, five spacious drawers that can’t fall out, enough room on top to comfortably fit a laptop (in addition to the main computer), stainless hardware, polyurethane casters, […]
