How-To: Small Bobbin from Plastic Straw
The wikiHow tutorial of the day is this clever idea: use a plastic straw as mini bobbins for a travel sewing kit!
Tools
Hollow spy bolts
Brian Dereu of Hollow Spy Coins showed us how to make this hollow dead-drop bolt for stashing secret messages back in MAKE 16. It’s not hard to do if you have access to the necessary equipment–a drill press, hacksaw, vise, grinder, and the appropriate taps and dies. But if you don’t have those tools, or you don’t have the time to use them, and you still want a spy bolt, Brian will gladly sell you one hand-made by his family and him for the not-unreasonable price of $37.
Bulbdial clock has no moving parts, casts shadows for hands
This clever clock kit from EMSL has an analog-style face, but no hands. Instead, kinda like a sundial, it has a “gnomon” that sticks up in the middle. Three rings of inward-pointing LEDs are positioned around the rim, each a different color and each at a different angle relative to the face. The blue ring is at the shallowest angle, and thus casts the longest shadow representing the “seconds” hand. The red ring is at the steepest angle and casts the shortest shadow to make the “hours” hand. The green ring, in the middle, is minutes. Check the video above, courtesy YouTube user amandachou, to see it in action.
The “Bulbdial” clock is available as a kit with four different case options, but the clear/black variety shown above is definitely my favorite because it shows off the cool retro-futurist logo on the circuit board. Here’s a time-lapse video of YouTuber jcorsaro building one from a kit.
MAKE asks: Guitar finishing techniques
A few weeks ago, I picked up a LC-Style Guitar kit from the Maker Shed. I have always wanted this style of guitar, and the fact that it’s a kit made me want it even more. The fist step to assembling the guitar is to finish all the wood components, and that’s where I’m asking […]
Wine cork pincushion and toolholder
And sometimes, it’s just this simple. Urbanwoodswalker writes on Flickr: This is a real handy holder I came up with for those delicate tools such as pin vice, delicate tweezers, sewing needles and pins. Even the stray craft blade. I glued nine wine corks to a jar lid. And that is it. The jar is […]
Desktop AS Whiteboard
Over at Curious Inventor (Atlanta, GA), they were inspired by the whiteboard benchtops at the Freeside Atlanta hackerspace. For $12, they got a 8×4 foot piece of panel board from a home store and turned it into a desktop they can write on.
Lego ruler graduated in bricks, studs
Interesting concept from Thingiverse user zanew. “Studs” is pretty self-explanatory; I think “bricks” means the vertical height of a brick. That side should be subdivided in “plates,” methinks.