Tag Archives: Wood

Need Strength? It’s Modified Wood You Want!

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Wood is surely one of the most versatile materials available. It can be found in a huge variety of colours and physical properties depending on the variety of the tree that grew it, and it has been fashioned into all conceivable devices, products, and structures over millenia. It’s not without shortcomings though, and one of the most obvious is that it can’t match the strength of some other materials. To carry large forces with a piece of wood that piece has to be made much larger than a corresponding piece of steel, something which is not a problem in a …read more

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Celebrating the Olympics With Flaming Windmills

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Like many of us, [Gustav Evertsson] was looking for an excuse to set stuff on fire and spin it around really fast to see what would happen. Luckily for him (and us) the Winter Olympics have started, which ended up being the perfect guise for this particular experiment. With some motors from eBay and some flaming steel wool, he created a particularly terrifying version of the Olympic’s iconic linked rings logo. Even if you won’t be tuning in for the commercials Winter Games, you should at least set aside 6 minutes to watch this build video.

The beginning of the …read more

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Robotic Table Saw Automates Finger Joints

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We’ve all seen finger joints or box joints, those interlocking puzzle pieces that make laser-cut plywood enclosures such a fixture for DIY projects. But laser cutters make finger joints look much easier to fabricate than they are with traditional woodworking tools, which often lead to disappointing results.

But this finger joint cutting robot is no traditional woodworking tool, and [timschefter] put a lot of work into building the rig. We have to admit that when we first saw the video below, the thought of having a table saw in our shop that could be turned on with a button on …read more

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Pi Handheld With a Mindblowing Enclosure

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The Raspberry Pi is possibly the world’s most popular emulation platform these days. While it was never intended to serve this purpose, the fact remains that a small, compact computer with flexible I/O is ideally suited to it. We’ve featured a multitude of builds over the years using a Pi in a mobile form factor to take games on the go. [Michael]’s build, however, offers a lot more than a few Nintendo ROMs and some buttons from eBay. It’s a tour de force in enclosure design.

The build starts with the electronics. In 2017 it’s no longer necessary to cobble …read more

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Engineering and Artistry Meet an Untimely End at Burning Man

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Burning Man is so many different things to so many people, that it defies neat description. For those who attend, it always seems to be a life-changing experience, for good or for ill. The story of one man’s Burning Man exhibition is a lesson in true craftsmanship and mind-boggling engineering, as well as how some events can bring out the worst in people.

For [Malcolm Tibbets], aka [the tahoeturner], Burning Man 2017 was a new experience. Having visited last year’s desert saturnalia to see his son [Andy]’s exhibition, the studio artist decided to undertake a massive display in his medium …read more

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Hand-Carving Geometric Art

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[Scott Cramer] is a retired professional woodworker who specializes in geometric art made from beautifully joined wood. In this project he’s carving four interlocked cloverleaf rings from a block of basswood. First he made a series of cuts to turn the block into a cuboctahedron, a geometric solid comprising six squares and eight triangles. Then he drew on the basic lines of the rings on the wood and went to work with a chisel, smoothing and separating the rings and carving out the interior. You can see more shots of the project on his Facebook post, which is included after …read more

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A Fix for the Lightweight Machine Tool Shakes

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No matter what material you work with, the general rule is that with machine tools, the heavier, the better. Some people can’t afford or don’t want big tools, though, even with their natural tendency to reduce vibrations. That doesn’t mean something can’t be done to help the little tools, like reducing vibration in a contractor-grade table saw.

This one might seem a little outside the usual confines of the hackosphere, but nobody can doubt [Matthias Wandel]’s hacker chops and he really shows off his problem-solving skills with this one. His well-worn contractor-style table saw has had more than a few …read more

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Wooden Word Wristwatch Wows Woomies

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[HakuG] wanted to make a watch for his roommates, and had a design project due. He killed two birds with one stone, and then some. The result is a classic word clock, but with a refined all-wood look that’s also small enough to wear on your wrist.

Nothing good ever comes out right the first time, and the log of [HakuG]’s different versions is full of different attempts, all of them just fine in their own right, but none of them “perfect”. Kudos to [HakuG] for sticking with it and refining the project far past the initial prototype stage to …read more

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Wooden Word Wristwatch Wows Woomies

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[HakuG] wanted to make a watch for his roommates, and had a design project due. He killed two birds with one stone, and then some. The result is a classic word clock, but with a refined all-wood look that’s also small enough to wear on your wrist.

Nothing good ever comes out right the first time, and the log of [HakuG]’s different versions is full of different attempts, all of them just fine in their own right, but none of them “perfect”. Kudos to [HakuG] for sticking with it and refining the project far past the initial prototype stage to …read more

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Scissor Lift Table From the Wood Shop, for the Wood Shop

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The value of a mobile adjustable height cart in the shop can’t be overestimated. From moving tools around to installing heavy fixtures on walls and ceiling, a scissor-lift platform is a great tool. Commercial versions get a bit expensive, though, so a shop-built scissor lift table made of wood might be a nice project for the budget-minded to tackle.

Wood might not be your first choice for a fixture such as this, but it’s what [Marius Hornberger] is set up to use, and with proper species selection and careful engineering, it can make for an amazingly sturdy table. [Marius] chose …read more

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