Collaborate Disseminate
If you’ve ever played air hockey, you know how the tiny jets of air shooting up from the pinholes in the playing surface reduce friction with the puck. But what if you turned that upside down? What if the puck had holes that shot the air downward? We’re not sure …read more
Continue reading Used EDM Electrodes Repurposed as Air Bearings for Precision Machine Tools
Here at Hackaday, we thought we’d seen every method of making PCBs: CNC machining, masking and etching with a variety of chemicals, laser engraving, or even the crude but effective method of scratching away the copper with a utility knife. Whatever works is fine with us, really, but there still …read more
Continue reading Prototyping PCBs with Electrical Discharge Machining
Remember when tricking out a bike with a headlight meant clamping a big, chrome, bullet-shaped light to your handlebar and bolting a small generator to your front fork? Turning on the headlight meant flipping the generator into contact with the front wheel, powering the incandescent bulb for the few feet it took for the drag thus introduced to grind you to a halt. This ridiculous arc-lamp bicycle headlight is not that. Not by a long shot.
We’re used to seeing [Alex] doing all manner of improbable, and sometimes impossible, things on his popular KREOSAN YouTube channel. And we’re also used …read more
Continue reading DIY Arc Light Makes An Unnecessarily Powerful Bicycle Headlight
You may think electrochemistry sounds like an esoteric field where lab-coated scientists labor away over sophisticated instruments and publish papers that only other electrochemists could love. And you’d be right, but only partially, because electrochemistry touches almost everything in modern life. For proof of that look no further than your nearest pocket, assuming that’s where you keep your smartphone and the electrochemical cell that powers it.
Electrochemistry is the study of the electrical properties of chemical reactions and does indeed need sophisticated instrumentation. That doesn’t mean the instruments have to break the grant budget, though, as [Kyle Lopin] shows with …read more
Continue reading Cheap PSoC Enables Electrochemistry Research
Microwave oven transformer spot welder builds are about as common as Nixie tube clocks around here. But this spot welder is anything but common, and it has some great lessons about manufacturing techniques and how to achieve a next level look.
Far warning that [Mark Presling] has devoted no fewer than five videos to this build. You can find a playlist on his YouTube channel, and every one of them is well worth the time. The videos covering the meat of what went into this thing of beauty are below. The guts are pretty much what you expect from a …read more
Many years ago [ScorchWorks] built an electrical-discharge machining tool (EDM) and recently decided to write about it. And there’s a video embedded after the break.
The build is based on the designs described in the book “Build an EDM” by Robert Langolois. An EDM works by creating lots of little electrical discharges between an electrode in the desired shape and a material underneath a dielectric solvent bath. This dissolves the material exactly where the operator would like it dissolved. It is one of the most precise and gentle machining operations possible.
His EDM is built mostly out of found parts. …read more
Continue reading Homemade EDM Can Cut Through Difficult Materials Like Magnets With Ease