Simple Shop-made Taps for Threading Wood

Wood can be the material of choice for many kinds of projects, but it often falls out of the running in favor of metal or plastic if it needs to take a threaded fastener. But with a little ingenuity you can make your own wood taps and cut threads that will perform great.

Making wood do things that wood isn’t supposed to do is [Matthias Wandel]’s thing. Hackers the world over know and use his wood gears designer to lay out gears for all kinds of projects from musical marble machines to a wooden Antikythera mechanism. Woodworkers have been threading …read more

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Solenoid Engine with Woodworking Chops

Simple, elegant, and well executed. This solenoid engine build is everything we’ve come to love about [Matthias Wandel]’s work. If you don’t recognize his name you probably remember the name of his site: Wood Gears.

In what feels like an afternoon project he put together a solenoid engine. It translates the linear motion of a small solenoid into the circular motion of a flywheel. The only specialized part in this hack is the solenoid. It has a pretty long throw and includes a hinge pin at the end.

The rest is crafted mostly of wood — it is admirable how  …read more

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