Collaborate Disseminate
Steel is scarce. Wood is not an option. And you need a boat now. These wartime circumstances drove innovation in all kinds of crazy directions, and one somewhat less crazy …read more Continue reading Concrete Boat Cements Its Way To High Speeds
What do you do when you have a whole warehouse sized facility and an industrial sized CNC foam cutter? Clearly, the only choice is to build giant RC aircraft, and …read more Continue reading World’s Biggest Foam RC Plane Takes To The Skies, But Only Barely!
Aviation consists of two major groups. Airplane enthusiasts, and helicopter enthusiasts. The two groups rarely get along, each extolling the virtues of their chosen craft. Somewhere in between are autogyro …read more Continue reading Autogyro Models are Hard — Even for [Peter Sripol]
If there’s one thing you can count on [Peter Sripol] for, it’s for defining the the aviation category of “Don’t Try This At Home.” In the video below the break, …read more Continue reading Fifty Motored Paraglider Partly Flies, Partly Glides
Peter Sripol really likes building gravity defying death traps. He recently flew the fourth ultralight, which he designed and built himself. For a taste of what’s going on here, the wings have aluminum tube spars and are made of hot-wire-cut styrofoam sections.
To keep the plane simple, he got rid …read more
Every hacker has dreamt of building their own tank at some point. Or maybe that’s just us. [Peter Sripol] and [Sam Foskuhl] have built one at a scale which is big enough to be rideable, but small enough that neighbors don’t get concerned.
An electric wheelchair is at the heart of the build. After ripping out its internals, the two motors with gearboxes are directly connected to the two tracks, allowing differential steering. Holding everything together is a solid welded steel frame – essential for years of reliable sieging.
The tracks themselves are simple strips of wood, cut and assembled …read more
Continue reading On The Right Tracks: Electric Wheelchair Guts Find New Life As Tank
Mini indoor drones have become an incredibly popular gift in the last few years since they’re both cool and inexpensive. For a while they’re great fun to fly around, until the inevitable collision with a wall, piece of furniture, or family member. Often not the most structurally sound of products, a slightly damaged quad can easily be confined to a cupboard for the rest of its life. But [Peter Sripol] has an idea for re-using the electronics from a mangled quad by building his own RC controlled paper aeroplane.
[Peter] uses the two rear motors from a mini quadcopter to …read more
There are no shortage of Nerf gun mods out there. From simply upgrading springs to removing air restrictors, the temptation of one-upping your opponents in a Nerf war speaks to many!
Not content with such lowly modifications [Peter Sripol] decided that his blaster needed to see some propane action.
[Peter] completely stripped out the existing firing mechanism before creating a new combustion chamber from some soldered copper pipe. He added a propane tank and valve on some 3D-printed mounts, and replaced the barrel to produce some intense firepower.
To ignite the fuel inside the combustion chamber, some taser circuitry creates …read more
Continue reading Nerf blaster goes next-level with propane power
What do you do during the winter months in Ohio? Sledding of course! Sledding normally takes place on hills, but [Peter Sripol] is no slave to the terrain. He’s built an air sled to conquer the barren wastelands of unplowed parking lots. Air sleds aren’t as outlandish as you might think — the Soviet Union had decades of success with them.
The project starts with toboggan style plastic sled. [Peter] built a frame into the plastic using an aluminum square. The frame is used to support a motor pod at the back of the sled. The motor, of course, comes …read more
For the last few weeks, RC pilot extraordinaire [Peter Sripol] has been working on his biggest project to date. It’s effectively a manned RC plane, now legally a Part 103 ultralight. Now all that work is finally bearing fruit. [Peter] is flying this plane on some short hops down a grass runway. He’s flying it, and proving that you can build a plane in a basement, in under two months, constructed almost entirely out of insulation foam.
[Peter] has been documenting this build on his YouTube channel, and although the materials for this plane are mostly sourced from either Home …read more
Continue reading How To Build An Airplane In A Month And A Half