Water vortex exhibit repair gives a look at the bearing and gasket design

vortex-repair

[Ben Krasnow's] water vortex machine has been an exhibit in the lobby of the San Jose City Hall for quite some time now. Unfortuantely he recently had to perform some repair work on it due to the parts inside the water chamber rusting. This is the same water vortex that we saw about a year ago. It uses a power drill to drive an impeller at the bottom of a water column to produce the vortex. … [Read more...]

Guitar pickup winding workstation

pickup

After a bit of inspiration, [Pete] decided to build a solid body electric guitar for himself. Instead of assembling a conglomeration of off-the-shelf parts, he plans on building just about everything from scratch. This includes the guitar pickups, so he built himself a pickup winder that has measures RPM, ETA until done, and auto stop for when the pickup is complete. Electric guitar pickups are … [Read more...]

Crazy slingshot guy at it again with a 220 lb steel ball cannon

80mm_slingshot_cannon

Good old [Jörg Sprave]. That guy just doesn’t quit building insane slingshots. If he’s not honing his machete slinging skills in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, he’s blowing out car windows with giant steel balls. The huge cannon you see above is modeled off a small slingshot he made a while back, which fired 8mm steel bearings. In its larger form, the slingshot is said to be … [Read more...]

Engine Hacks: Adding fuel injection to a riding lawnmower

fuelInjectionLawnMower

Are you tired of fiddling with the engines on your lawn equipment every spring, trying to get them to run again? [jhark] was and decided to do something about it by converting his riding lawnmower over to fuel injection. After stealing a fuel injector from his van and bolting it onto the mower's carburetor, he sprinkled in a dash of Arduino magic. With a small amount of code tweaking he was … [Read more...]

Monitoring water levels with a Parallax Ping sensor

arduino_parallax_ping_water_level_sensor

When you need a mechanism to detect the water level within a container or tank, you have several different options. Most people opt for a simple float or probe that sits in the water, while others use optics to sense when the water is reaching an undesired level. This device built by [Danilo Abbasciano] uses a Parallax Ping sensor instead. If the sensor is placed at the top of a well, cistern, … [Read more...]