Category Archives: jig

Turn Failed Prints into Office Fun with a Paper Airplane Maker

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If you’re anything like us, you feel slightly guilty when you send a job to a printer only to find that twenty pages have printed wrong. Maybe it’s a typo, maybe it’s the dreaded landscape versus portrait issue. Whatever it is, trees died for your mistake, and there’s nothing you can do about it except to recycle the waste. But first, wipe that guilt away by using this one-stroke paper airplane maker to equip the whole office for an epic air battle.

We have to admit, automated paper handling has always fascinated us. The idea that a printer can reliably …read more

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A Pin Pusher To Make Life Easier

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Picture the scene: you’ve whipped up an amazing new gadget, your crowdfunding campaign has gone well, and you’ve got a couple hundred orders to fill. Having not quite hit the big time, you’re preparing to tackle the production largely yourself. Parts begin to flood in, and you’ve got tube after tube of ICs ready to populate your shiny new PCBs? After the third time, you’re sick and tired of fighting with those irksome little pins. Enter [Stuart] with the answer.

It’s a simple tool, attractively presented. Two pieces of laser cut acrylic are assembled in a perpendicular fashion, creating a …read more

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Print a Plywood Bending Jig

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Ever wanted to bend plywood but don’t have the equipment or the space to use it? Whatever the issue, dust off those project ideas and take a look at [Ryo Kosaka]’s experimental bending jig.All you need are some boards, a couple of fasteners, and [Ryo]’s 3-D printed connectors.

This is quite the elegant solution for bending in a small space with little noise. The main departure from standard bending methods is that instead of making the bend by clamping the veneers between a pair of positive and negative mold halves, most of the clamping pressure comes from air pumped into …read more

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Homemade Test Jig Is Cheaper Than Outsourcing

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In the past, [Sjaak] has had his testing and programming jigs made for him in Shenzhen, but realized they weren’t that great of a value. They weren’t terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things, but they didn’t include any wiring, so he was still spending his own time and money. His quest to develop his own in-house jigs not only netted him a considerable cost savings in the end, but also produced a nicely detailed post on his site for anyone else who may be heading down the same path. That’s a win-win in our book.

The idea behind …read more

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Shop-Made Fixture Turns Out Dream Welds

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You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, and you can tell a lot about a craftsman by the tools and jigs he or she builds. Whether for one-off jobs or long-term use, these ad hoc tools, like this tubing rotator for a welding shop, help deliver results beyond the ordinary.

What we appreciate about [Delrin]’s tool is not how complex it is — with just a motor from an old satellite dish and a couple of scooter wheels, it’s anything but complicated. What we like is that to fabricate some steering links, each of …read more

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Reuleaux Coaster

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What’s better than a cool build? A cool build with valuable advice! Add a few flashy pictures and you have [Martin Raynsford]’s Reuleaux triangle coasters blog post. [Martin Raynsford] wanted to share his advice about the importance of using jigs and we’re sold. He was able to make 100 coasters in a single day and if he’s like us, after number ten, the work gets a little hurried and that is when mistakes are made.

Jig is a broad term when it comes to tooling but essentially, it holds your part in place while you work on it. In this …read more

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Pogo Pin Serial Adapter Thing

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A few weeks ago, I was working on a small project of mine, and I faced a rather large problem. I had to program nearly five hundred badges in a week. I needed a small programming adapter that would allow me to stab a few pads on a badge with six pogo pins, press a button, and move onto the next badge.

While not true for all things in life, sometimes you need to trade quality for expediency. This is how I built a terrible but completely functional USB to serial adapter to program hundreds of badges in just a …read more

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Arduino and Encoder form Precision Jig for Cutting and Drilling

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“Measure twice, cut once” is great advice in every aspect of fabrication, but perhaps nowhere is it more important than when building a CNC machine. When precision is the name of the game, you need measuring tools that will give you repeatable results and preferably won’t cost a fortune. That’s the idea behind this Arduino-based measuring jig for fabricating parts for a CNC build.

When it comes to building on the cheap, nobody holds a candle to [HomoFaciens]. We’ve seen his garbage can CNC build and encoders from e-waste and tin cans, all of which gave surprisingly good results despite …read more

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Lean Thinking Helps STEM Kids Build a Tiny Windfarm

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When we see a new build by [Gord] from Gord’s Garage, we never know what to expect. He seems to be pretty skilled at whatever he puts his hand to, with a great design sense and impeccable craftsmanship. You might expect him to tone it down a little for a STEM-outreach wind turbine project then, but when you get a chance to impress 28 fifth and sixth graders, you might as well go for it.

Starting with an idea from his daughter’s teacher for wind turbines each kid could make, [Gord] applied a little lean methodology so the kids would …read more

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Make Your Own Arduino Header Pins

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There are two kinds of people in the world (and, no, this isn’t a binary joke). People who love the Arduino, and people who hate it. If you’ve ever tried to use a standard prototype board to mount on an Arduino, you’ll know what kind of person you are. When you notice the pins aren’t on 0.1 inch centers, you might think, “What the heck were those idiots thinking!” Or, you might say, “How clever! This way the connectors are keyed to prevent mistakes.” From your choice of statement, we can deduce your feelings on the subject.

[Rssalnero] clearly said …read more

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