Fresh hacks every day
If you’ve ever used an extruding 3D printer, you know that the resulting prints aren’t exactly smooth. At the Southackton hackerspace [James] and [Bracken] worked out a method of smoothing the parts out using vapor. The method involves heating acetone until it forms a vapor, then exposing ABS parts to the vapor. The method only works with ABS, but … Read the rest
Hydrogen peroxide – the same stuff you can pick up from a drug store or beauty supply store – is one of those very interesting chemicals that belongs on every maker’s cabinet. At concentrations of about 30%, it’s perfect for etching PCB boards, and at even higher concentrations – about 70% – it can be used as rocket fuel. Unfortunately … Read the rest
Looks like ice-cube trays are once again proving their versatility as this one is serving as the vessel for a home made lead-acid battery. With a collection of uniformly sized non-conductive containers, it makes the perfect base for a set of small cells. This project is the culmination of a Hackerspace class about batteries, and was put together to … Read the rest
[Jordan] likes the flexibility that conductive inks offer when putting together electronic circuits, but says that they are often too expensive to purchase in decent quantities, and that they usually require substrate-damaging temperatures to cure. After reading a UIUC Materials Research Lab article about making conductive ink that anneals at relatively low temperatures, he decided to give it a shot.… Read the rest
Back during the Renaissance, great artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael would create their own paints. Of course paint is very cheap and readily available, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make your own paint by playing with chemistry.
Last summer, [Sean] at the Philly hackerspace Hive76 did some experiments with ferrofluids. For these experiments [Sean] prepared a bunch … Read the rest
[Ben] outdid himself. He successfully made monoliths of silica aerogel in his garage. Aerogel, the light-weight solid that has been referred to as ‘hard air’ is really freaking expensive especially in non-granulated form.
The techniques behind producing aerogels have been on the Internet for a fairly long time. A few uncommon chemicals and a supercritical drying chamber are required for … Read the rest
While many people have tried their hand at anodizing aluminum at home, there are plenty who would just as soon leave it up to the professionals due to the highly concentrated sulfuric acid required for the process. [Ken] started thinking about the process and wondered if there was a way to get comparable results using chemicals that are easier to … Read the rest
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