Collaborate Disseminate
In a perfect world, we’d all have laser cutters and could pop intricate designs out of acrylic sheets with just a few clicks of the mouse. But in reality, most …read more Continue reading How To Build With Acrylic Using the Tools You Have
Cutting every corner can lead to some shoddy projects, but [Terry Gilliam] shows us that cutting the right corners yields unforgettable animations when mixed with the right amount of quirky imagination. The signature animation style of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a mixture of [Terry]’s artistic craft and doing it with as little work as possible. You can watch after the break.
For [Terry], cutout animation is the quickest and easiest way he knows to convey an idea, a joke, or a story. With his vocal repertoire, even the sound effects can be produced in a basement studio. Sometimes, he …read more
[smash_hand] had a clear goal: a big, featureless, white plastic disk with RGB LEDs concealed around its edge. So what is it? A big ornament that could glow any color or trippy mixture of colors one desires. It’s an object whose sole purpose is to be a frame for soft, glowing light patterns to admire. The disk can be controlled with a simple smartphone app that communicates over Bluetooth, allowing anyone (or in theory anything) to play with the display.
The disk is made from 1/4″ clear plastic, which [smash_hand] describes as plexiglass, but might be acrylic or …read more
Continue reading RGB Disk Goes Interactive with Bluetooth; Shows Impressive Plastic Work
Becoming accomplished with a lathe is a powerful skillset, but it’s only half of the journey. Being clever comes later, and it’s the second part of the course. Patience is in there somewhere too, but let’s focus on being clever. [TimNummy] wants a knobbed bolt with critical parameters, so he makes his own. After the break, there is a sixty-second summary of the linked video.
Making stock hardware is a beginner’s tasks, so custom hardware requires ingenuity or expensive machinery. Adding finger notches to a bolthead is arbitrary with an indexing chuck, but one isn’t available. Instead, hex stock becomes …read more
Vibration is a fact of life in almost every machining operation. Whether you’re milling, drilling, turning, or grinding, vibration can result in chatter that can ruin a part. Fighting chatter has generally been a matter of adding more mass to the machine, but if you’re clever about things, chatter reduction can be accomplished electronically, too. (YouTube, embedded below.)
When you know a little something about resonance, machine vibration and chatter start to make sense. [AvE] spends quite a bit of time explaining and demonstrating resonance in the video — fair warning about his usual salty shop language. His goal with …read more
Continue reading Fighting Machine Tool Chatter with a 555 Timer
Drill bits are so cheap that when one is too chowdered up to keep working, we generally just toss it out. So you might expect a video on sharpening drill bits to be somewhat irrelevant, but [This Old Tony] makes it work.
The reason this video is worth watching is not just that you get to learn how to sharpen your bits, although that’s an essential metalworker’s skill. Where [This Old Tony]’s video shines is by explaining why a drill bit is shaped the way it is, which he does by fabricating a rudimentary twist drill bit from scratch. Seeing …read more
If generations of Hollywood heist films have taught us anything, it’s that knocking off a bank vault is pretty easy. It usually starts with a guy and a stethoscope, but that never works, so the bad guys break out the cutting torch and burn their way in. But knowing how to harness that raw power means you’ve got to learn the basics of oxy-acetylene, and [This Old Tony]’s new video will get your life of crime off on the right foot.
In another well-produced video, [Tony] goes into quite a bit of detail on the mysteries of oxygen and acetylene …read more
[NightHawkInLight] wants what may be the impossible – a dirt cheap replacement for a laser cutter or a water jet. He’s got this crazy idea about using electrolysis to etch sheet steel parts, but he just can’t get the process to work. Sounds like a job for the Hackaday community.
In theory, electrolytic cutting of metal is pretty simple to understand. Anyone who lives in the northeast of the USA knows all about how road salt can cut holes in steel given enough time – say, one winter into payments on that new car. Adding a few electrons to the …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Cutting Steel with Baking Soda
Hanging plotters, or two steppers controlling a dangling Sharpie marker on an XY plane, are nothing new to our community. But have you ever thought of trading out the Sharpie for a wood router bit and cutting through reasonably thick plywood sheets? That would give you a CNC machine capable of cutting out wood in essentially whatever dimensions you’d like, at reasonably low-cost. And that’s the idea behind [Bar]’s Maslow. It’s going to be a commercial product (we hope!), but it’s also entirely open source and indubitably DIYable.
[Bar] walks us through all of the design decisions in this video, …read more
Continue reading Maslow Brings The Wall Plotter Into The Woodshop
Laser-cut plywood boxes are cool. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the free projects out there for people to get started with when they get a laser cutter – it’s obviously a popular genre of project. Laser cut plywood boxes with combination locks are even cooler, especially when the combination is entered on four separate number selectors, on four sides of the very same box.
That’s exactly what [Sande24] has done, and the final result is mesmerizing. 30-40 parts are cut from plywood with a laser cutter, and assembled to construct the lockbox. The design could easily be reused …read more
Continue reading Have a Laser Cutter? He’s a Cool Combination Lock Box You Can Build!
