Clamps

Fast Toy Wood Car

Fast Toy Wood Car

Lots of my friends have kids, and that means lots of birthdays. I wanted to have a custom present that’s easy to make and has lots of room to play, in terms of design. A toy car fits perfectly. So I can build cars and make kids happy? Win-win! Download the templates.

Inkle Loom

Inkle Loom

Weaving is one of my favorite crafts because it’s meditative and challenging, practical and artistic. It combines plain-woven cloth’s simple elegance with the astounding complexity of a kilim split-stitch tapestry. I love the way woven straps look, but the idea of warping my floor loom just to make something as narrow as a strap for […]

Ribbon-Tie Sandals

Ribbon-Tie Sandals

Nearly as long as humankind has roamed the earth, people have been wearing shoes. Ancient Egyptians, Indians, and East Asians began sporting wooden sandals thousands of years ago. Thankfully, inexpensive power tools have sped up the tedious process of carving ergonomic shoes from slabs of wood. Add a few interchangeable ribbon ties, and you’ve got […]

Marble Adding Machine

Marble Adding Machine

Computers add binary numbers constantly, but we never see how. This elegant machine does the math using glass marbles. I started building marble track machines years ago using Lego. I experimented with all sorts of crazy ways for the marbles to descend. One was a rocker that shunted a stream of dropping marbles one-by-one to […]

Whack-a-Mole Game

Whack-a-Mole Game

Jim Chen designed an excellent electronic “Whack-a-Mole” game using 555 timers, LEDs, and bent-diode touch sensors, that you can build on a solderless breadboard