Collaborate Disseminate
We have no idea what a playing card press is, nor do we care. All we know is that after watching [Chris] from Clickspring make his playing card press, we want it.
Digging a little deeper, [Chris] offered to make this card press for [Chris Ramsay], a magician who specializes …read more
Continue reading The Clickspring Playing Card Press is a Work of Art
Which to buy first, a lathe or a mill? It’s a tough question for the aspiring home machinist with limited funds to spend on machine tools, but of course the correct answer is a lathe. With a lathe, we are told, all other machine tools can be built, including a …read more
Continue reading Scrapyard Milling Machine Gets Work Done on a Budget
When you’re going to build something big, it’s often a good idea to start small and work out the bugs first. That’s what [bitluni] did with his massive 1200-pixel LED video wall, which he unveiled at Maker Faire Hanover recently.
We covered his prototype a while back, a mere 300 …read more
Continue reading Giant LED Display is 1200 Balls to the Wall
Beginning metalworkers are often surprised at just how cheap steel can be. It’s a commodity made by the gigaton, and there are always plenty of extra pieces and scraps left over from big projects that are available for pennies a pound. But what you’ve got is often not what you …read more
Continue reading Shop-Made Tools Turn Cheap Steel into Telescoping Tubes
Four times the holes, four times the trouble. With the fate of repetitive motion injury looming due to the need to drill 1,200 holes, [bitluni] took matters into his own hands and built this nifty DIY hole punch for light-gauge sheet metal.
A little backstory will probably help understand why …read more
Continue reading Punch Those Hole-Drilling Blues Away with a Homebrew Punching Tool
Sometimes, there’s a job to be done and the required tools don’t fall easily to hand. [Bob] found himself in just such a position, needing to get some window flashing made up despite lacking a sheet metal break. After waiting far too long for someone else to do the job, …read more
Continue reading Build A Sheet Metal Brake With No Welding Required
When you grow up with something as the constant backdrop to your life, it’s easy to forget as an adult that not everyone else shares your instinctive knowledge of the subject. My dad is a blacksmith, he’s now retired, but as I was growing up his very active forge was …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: Let’s Talk About Anvils
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
Drilling holes is easy; humans have been doing it in one form or another for almost 40,000 years. Drilling really tiny holes in hard materials is more challenging, but still doable. Drilling deep, straight holes in hard materials is another thing altogether.
Luckily, these days we have electric discharge machining …read more
Continue reading [Ben Krasnow] Drills Really Small Holes with Electricity
Blacksmiths were the high technologists of fabrication up until the industrial revolution gained momentum. At its core, this is the art and science of making any needed tool or mechanism out of metal. Are you using the correct metal? Is the tool strong where it needs to be? And how …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: What is a Forge?