Collaborate Disseminate
Building something on your own usually carries with it certain benefits, such as being in full control over what it is you are building and what it will accomplish, as well as a sense of pride when you create something that finally works just the way you want it. If …read more
Chain sprockets are a key drivetrain component in a lot of builds. Unfortunately they can be difficult to source, particularly for those outside the reach of retailers like McMaster-Carr. In such situations, you might consider making your own.
The toothed profile on a chain sprocket can be produced in a …read more
Continue reading Making Your Own Chain Sprockets, The Tidy Way
The ability to look at a pile of trash, and see the for treasure is a skill we hold in high regard around here. [Meanwhile in the Garage] apparently has this skill in spades and built himself a metal bar bending machine using an old flywheel and starter pinion gear. …read more
Metal fabrication is a useful skill to have. There’s plenty you can achieve in your workshop at home, given the right tools. There’s lathes for turning, mills for milling, and bandsaws and dropsaws for chopping it all to pieces. But what do you do if you need to make hoops …read more
It’s becoming abundantly clear that [Colin Merkel] doesn’t know the definition of “good enough”. Not only has he recently completed his third (and most impressive) wristwatch build, but he also managed to put together one of the most ridiculously romantic gifts ever conceived. While some of us are giving our significant others a gift card to Starbucks, he made his girlfriend a watch with a chart on the face representing the position of the stars at the time and place of their first meeting.
As per his usual style, the documentation on this build is phenomenal. If paging through his …read more
In an increasingly paperless society, writing implements are becoming an obsolete technology for many of us. Certainly not the kind of thing the average person would think to spend more than a couple bucks on, to say nothing of machining one out of a solid piece of aluminum bar stock. But clearly [Bob] is not most people. He recently dropped us a line about a video he uploaded to his aptly-named YouTube channel “Making Stuff”, where he goes through the steps required to turn raw materials into a writing instrument worthy of a Jedi.
Starting with a piece of aluminum …read more
Continue reading Machined Lightsaber Pen for a More Civilized Age
The holidays are nearly upon us, and if you haven’t found the perfect gift for the Mall Ninja in your life yet, this latest hack might be just what you’re looking for. On his YouTube channel, [The Nocturnal Alchemist] demonstrates how to make ninja throwing stars (shuriken) out of an old circular saw blade. One could probably argue that a circular saw itself is close enough to throwing star if your only goal is to wreck some stuff in your backyard, but with this method they’ll have that official samurai look.
To start the process, he hits both sides of …read more
Laser cutters, waterjets, plasma cutters, CNC routers – most hackerspaces and even many dedicated home-gamers seem to have some kind of fancy tool for cutting sheet goods into intricate shapes. But with no access to a CNC machine and a need to cut a complex shape from sheet metal, [AlchemistDagger] cooked up this bare-bones and somewhat dangerous EDM rig to get the job done.
Electric discharge machining has been around for decades and is used a lot for harder metals like titanium and tool steel. The process makes sense to anyone who has seen contacts pitted and corroded by repeated …read more
[Mike] had a bunch of disused fitness machines lying around. Being a skilled welder, he decided to take them apart and put them back together in the shape of a belt grinder.
In particular, [Mike] is reusing the height-adjustment guide rail of an old workout bench to build the adjustable frame that holds the sanding belt. A powerful DC motor including a flywheel was scavenged from one treadmill, the speed controller came from another. [Mike] won’t miss the workout bench: Once you’re welding a piece of steel tube dead-center on a flywheel, as happened for the grinder’s drive wheel, you …read more
Continue reading Treadmill To Belt Grinder Conversion Worked Out
What’s green and black and used all over the shop? It’s [Make It Extreme]’s newest build, a scratch-built belt grinder. And as usual, the build video gets us in the mood to cut metal.
We’ll go out on a limb here and state that the lathe, and not the belt grinder, is the essential metalworking tool. That’s pretty clear from this build – the running gear is machined entirely on a lathe. But as central as the lathe is to machinery making, belt grinders like this one have to rate right up there in terms of shop utility.
You can …read more
Continue reading An Extremely Useful Shop-Built Belt Grinder
