Pliers

Guitar Strap Gamepad

Guitar Strap Gamepad

If you’re playing Rocksmith (and I think you should be), and you’re playing standing up (ditto), you have probably run into the “where do I put the controller” problem. The gamepad is required to navigate the menu system between songs, and if you play in a standing position you have to keep a stool or […]

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Bent-Wire Crank Toy

Bent-Wire Crank Toy

Making things with wire looks simple, but it can be challenging. Pick up a few wire-bending tricks, though, and you can sketch in 3 dimensions and make anything from a tiny, delicate figurine to a large, mechanical sculpture with moving parts. Like sketching with a pen on paper, there’s no right way to do it, […]

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Laboratory Cork Ring

Laboratory Cork Ring

Round-bottom flasks offer many advantages for chemical work that requires heating a liquid, but suffer from a major storage and handling drawback: They don’t sit flat on a work surface. The common solution is to equip the bench with one or more cork rings that the flasks can sit in, as shown, to cushion them […]

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Better Nerf Gun

Better Nerf Gun

Like most geek-filled offices, at my workplace we have several Nerf guns and similar toy weapons floating about. Not impressed with the performance of my colleague Lester’s Nerf Maverick, a mainstay of Nerf’s suction-cup-dart-firing “N-Strike” series, I decided to build a better Nerf gun myself. Here’s the result: a simple weapon, single shot only, but […]

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LED Robot Ornament

LED Robot Ornament

Crafting under pressure is irresistible. This year the Craftzine gals suggested an ornament swap– 12 days before Christmas. With a lot on our plates we all agreed to make time for crafting eight handmade ornaments each, and the deadline made it even more intense. Cheers to speed crafting!

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Carrot Lathe

Carrot Lathe

As part of a project for an Industrial Design studio I was instructed to come up with concepts for improving the enjoyment of a mobile meal/snack or food on the go. Nothing is more mobile than the ubiquitous baby carrot and during the project research phase I did a lot of reading on how baby […]

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