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Old Sole, New Shoe

Old Sole, New Shoe

You’d be hard pressed to find an accessory infused with more passion and personality than shoes. Despite this, we’re offered an extremely limited number of styles and models. Unless you’re super rich (unlikely) or a shoemaker (even less likely) you probably haven’t considered custom footwear. However, making your own shoes may be easier than you […]

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Non-Pesticide Patio Pest Control Device

Non-Pesticide Patio Pest Control Device

How to fabricate, out of mostly recycled materials, an ultraviolet nighttime bug trap, since ultraviolet light attracts most insects. Tired of nighttime critters and drowning in bug spray? Try this blacklight device to control mosquitoes and other nighttime insects.

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Treasure Finder

Treasure Finder

Who hasn’t dreamed about owning their own metal detector and searching for buried treasure, or at least a few dropped coins? In this project, we will build a metal detector based on a dual oscillator circuit. One oscillator is fixed, and the other varies depending upon the proximity of metal objects. The beat frequency between […]

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Rocket-Launched Camcorder

Rocket-Launched Camcorder

Hack a $30, single-use camcorder to make it reusable, then launch it up in a model rocket and capture thrilling astronaut’s-view footage of high-speed neighborhood escape and re-entry.

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ESP/psi Testing Lamp

ESP/psi Testing Lamp

Albert Einstein once wrote that God does not play dice with the universe. To which Niels Bohr (or Enrico Fermi) reportedly replied, “Stop telling God what to do with his dice.” Here’s a mood lamp that expresses these dice as 4 multicolored cubes that blink randomly, with true randomness — not the deterministic, pseudo-random chaos […]

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Safe Bamboo Swords

Safe Bamboo Swords

At an outdoor festival, my sons and I saw a group of teens play-fighting with padded swords. That looked like a lot of fun, so we tried making our own. It was remarkably easy and inexpensive — each sword costs about $4.

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Toy Car Launcher

Toy Car Launcher

This project was inspired by my son’s love of Hot Wheels cars and making them go fast, as well as my husband’s love of making cool toys for him and wanting any excuse to play with power tools. This car launcher shoots out Hot Wheels-type cars using rubber band power, and it’s makeable using materials […]

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