Fail of the Week: Supercapacitor Spot Welder

[Julian] needed to weld a bit of nickel to some steel and decided to use a spot welding technique. Of course he didn’t have a spot welder sitting around. Since these are fairly simple machines so [Julian] set out to build a spot welder using a charged supercapacitor. The fundamentals …read more

Continue reading Fail of the Week: Supercapacitor Spot Welder

Shop-Made Tools Turn Cheap Steel into Telescoping Tubes

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

Can You 3D Print an Axe?

3D printers hit the scene in a big way in the last decade, and thanks to the constant improvements that we’ve seen since then you can now get a decent one, assembled or as a kit, for a reasonable price. The one major drawback is that almost all of these printers are limited to printing in plastic, which has its obvious limitations. Printing in metal seems like the next logical step, and a group from Michigan Tech has created something that is accessible to most of us. Spoiler: they used plastic and metal printing to print a functioning axe.

Untill …read more

Continue reading Can You 3D Print an Axe?

Welding Batteries With Batteries

Welding equipment is always expensive and bulky, right? Heavens no! [Jaromir Sukuba] is making a welder for battery tabs which can fit in a pocket and gets its power from a coin cell. It may be expensive to power compared to a mains welder, but for the sake of portability this is quite the hack. Not only that, but it uses 555 timers in the charging circuit.

His entry for the 2017 Coin Cell Challenge saps every bit of power from a coin cell and stores it up in a 100F supercapacitor bank. All that stored energy takes a long …read more

Continue reading Welding Batteries With Batteries

JB Weld Fixes Cracked Cylinder Heads

There are persistent rumors that the main ingredient in JB Weld is magic. This two-part epoxy that you would normally find on a shelf next to your basic 5-minute epoxy, Titebond, various cyanoacrylates, and Gorilla glue is somehow different. Stories of ‘some guy’ in the Yukon using JB Weld on a cracked engine block abound. These stories are of course met with skepticism.

Now, finally, we have evidence you can use JB Weld to fix an engine. [Project Farm] over on YouTube gave it the ultimate test: he took the cylinder head off a lawnmower, took a grinder to …read more

Continue reading JB Weld Fixes Cracked Cylinder Heads