Collaborate Disseminate
We take easy communications for granted these days. It’s no bother to turn on a lightbulb remotely via a radio link or sense the water level in your petunias, but …read more Continue reading Bidirectional Data Transfer Through Mud?
Normally on “Mining and Refining,” we concentrate on the actual material that’s mined and refined. We’ve covered everything from copper to tungsten, with side trips to more unusual materials like …read more Continue reading Mining and Refining: Fracking
What are the options you have for securing your workpiece to the drill press table? [Rex Krueger] shows us that there’s plenty, and you ought to know about them. He …read more Continue reading Drill Press Piece Fastening 101
We humans are good at a lot of things, but making holes in the ground has to be among our greatest achievements. We’ve gone from grubbing roots with a stick to feeding billions with immense plows pulled by powerful tractors, and from carving simple roads across the land to drilling …read more
Continue reading Extraterrestrial Excavation: Digging Holes on Other Worlds
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union decided to dig a hole for science. Not just any hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole reached a depth of over 12 kilometers, the deepest at the time and the second deepest today by just a few meters. Since this was one of the few holes dug this deep that wasn’t being drilled for oil, the project was eventually abandoned. [Dmitry] was able to find some core samples from the project though, and he headed up to the ruins of the scientific site with his latest project which produces musical sounds from the core samples. …read more
Continue reading Superdeep Borehole Samples Create Non-boring Music
[Dickel]’s robot MDi #4 has been in progress for several years, but what we wanted to draw your attention to is the way the parts have been fabricated and what kind of remarkable results are possible with careful design, measurement, cutting, and finishing. Much of MDi #4 was made by hand-cutting and drilling sheets of high impact polystyrene (HIPS) with a utility knife and layering them as needed. Epoxy and aluminum provide gap filling and reinforcement of key sections, and fiberglass took care of one of the larger sections.
The process [Dickel] follows is to prototype using cardboard first. Parts …read more
Subsidies are keeping “zombie energy” alive. Continue reading The US Is Paying Big Oil to Keep Fossil Fuels Profitable
Setting up your workpiece is often the hardest part of any machining operation. The goal is to secure the workpiece so it can’t move during machining in such a way that nothing gets in the way of the tooling. Magnetic chucks are a great choice for securely and flexibly holding down workpieces, as this simple shop-built electromagnetic vise shows.
It looks like [Make It Extreme] learned a thing or two about converting microwave oven transformers to electromagnets when they built a material handling crane for the shop. Their magnetic vise, designed for a drill press but probably a great choice …read more
Continue reading Your Work Won’t Move with a Magnetic Drill Press Vise
ExxonMobil has lost at least $1 billion in Arctic drilling investments due to Obama’s sanctions on Russia. Continue reading Trump’s Secretary of State Pick and Putin Want to Drill for Oil in the Arctic
The Obama Administration recently restricted all offshore Arctic drilling till at least 2022, but some scientists think it should never happen. Continue reading These Scientists Say the US Should Ban Offshore Arctic Drilling Forever