PVC Pipe Transformed Into Handy Tool Box

Would you believe the multi-tiered toolbox pictured here started its life as a piece of bog standard PVC pipe? It certainly wouldn’t be our first choice of building material, but as shown in the video after the break, it only takes a heat source and something suitably flat to convert a piece of PVC pipe into a versatile sheet material.

Flattening the heated PVC.

Unrolling the PVC pipe and getting it flat is covered in the first minute of the video, while the rest of the run time is dedicated to building the tool box. Each and every piece you see here, except for the screws and lid hinges, is carefully cut from the PVC sheet. Though we suspect a few more chunks of pipe went into this build than the video would have you believe.

Would we build such an elaborate box if we had to cut each piece of the thing out by hand? Probably not. But then, we can’t deny the final results here are pretty impressive. Incidentally, if you thought those hinges on the top looked a lot like links removed from a watch band…you’d be correct.

Admittedly we’re a bit late covering this one, and under normal circumstances we might have let it slip by given the several million views it’s amassed over the last year. But the central theme of reusing a common material to build something unexpected is solid Hackaday territory, and aligns closely with this year’s Hackaday Prize challenges.

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Hot Wire Ribbon Cutter Ceremoniously Heats Up Productivity

Anyone who’s ever cut ribbon, grosgrain or otherwise, may be dismayed by the frayed edge. There are methods of avoiding this, like cutting the ribbon diagonally, or double-diagonally into a forked point, or cutting it straight across and cauterizing the threads with a lighter. But if you have a thirteen dozen baker’s dozens’ worth of goodies to festoon, ain’t nobody got time for that.

[IgorM92] made this hot wire ribbon cutter for his wife, who has a yummy-looking baking business. It combines the cutting and the heat-sealing into a single step by using the heating element from an old soldering iron. If you don’t have one of those, you could just as easily use the nichrome wire from an old hair dryer, a toaster, or wire-wound resistor.

Since the idea is essentially shorting a power source to heat up a wire, it should be done safely. [IgorM92] used a phone charger to condition mains power down to 5 V. There isn’t much else to the circuit, just a rocker switch, a power-indicating LED, and its resistor, but this simple project will no doubt save a lot of time and labor. Burn past the break to watch it ramp up production.

Nichrome wire is good for cutting foam, too. Here’s a bare-bones version that can be made in minutes.

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Do You Have An Endangered Craft?

It is probably fair to say that as Hackaday readers, you will all be people with the ability to make things. Some of you can make incredible things, as your writers we are in constant awe of the projects that pass through our hands. But even if you feel that your skills in the maker department aren’t particularly elite, you’ll have a propensity for work in this direction or you wouldn’t be here.

Most of the craft we feature involves technologies that are still very modern indeed to the majority of the population. We for example know that the first 3D printers were built decades ago and that we take them for granted on our benches, but to the Man In The Street they are still right up there with flying cars and time-travelling police telephone boxes.

We use 3D printers and microcontrollers because they are the tools of our age, but how different might our crafts have been if we’d been born a few centuries ago? Apprenticed to a master craftsman as teenagers, we (well, at least you boys!) would have learned  a single craft to a high level of expertise, making by hand the day-to-day products of life in those times.

The Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation and mass production, and today very few of the products you use will be hand-made. There may still be a few craftsmen with the skills to produce them by hand, but in the face of the mass-produced alternative there is little business for them and they are in inevitable decline. In an effort to do something about this and save what skills remain, the Heritage Crafts Association in the UK has published a list of dying crafts, that you can view either alphabetically, or by category of risk.

It’s a list with a British flavour as you might expect from the organisation behind it, after all for example hand stitched cricket balls are not in high demand in the Americas. But it serves also as a catalogue of some fascinating crafts, as well as plenty that will undoubtedly be of interest to Hackaday readers. Making hand-made planes, saws, or spades, for example, or at least where this is being written, coracle making.

As your Hackaday scribe this is close to home, a blacksmith carrying on her father’s business can’t earn enough to live in Southern England while an electronic engineer and technical journalist can. Eventually there will be one less blacksmith plying the craft, and though his tools and some of his skills will live on here, the business will not. Take a look at the list of crafts, do any of you have them? Or do you know of any craftspeople who have any of the skills listed, that the HCA might not know about? Let us know in the comments.

Treadle lathe image: Patrick-Emil Zörner (Paddy) [CC BY-SA 2.0].

Maker Faire Kansas City: That’s A Wrap

The 5th annual Kansas City Maker Faire was as fun as ever, but it definitely felt different from previous years. There seemed to be an unofficial emphasis on crafts this year, and I mean this in the broadest sense of the word. There was more exposure for the event in the local media, and this attracted a wider variety of faire-goers. But the exposure also brought more corporate sponsorship. This wasn’t an exclusively bad thing, though. For instance, several people from Kansas City-based construction firm JE Dunn were guiding mini makers through a birdhouse build.

Many of the this year’s booths were focused on a particular handicraft.  A local music shop that makes custom brass and woodwind instruments had material from various stages of the building process on display. Several tables away, a man sat making chainmaille bags. At one booth, a girl was teaching people how to fold origami cranes. Several makers had various geek culture accessories for sale, like a shoulder bag made from a vintage Voltron sweatshirt. The guys from SeeMeCNC made the 12-hour drive with the Part Daddy, their 17-foot tall delta printer. They printed up a cool one-piece chair on Saturday, then made a child-sized version of it on Sunday.

The entire lower level of the venue was devoted to a series of exhibits related to the film and television industry. Collectively, they covered the entire production process from the casting call to the red carpet. Several local prop and costume makers were showing off their fantastic creations, including [Steven] of SKS Props. He started making video game props for fun a few years ago. These days, his work adorns the offices of some of those same game companies.

Of course, there was plenty to see and do outside, too. All the kids playing human foosball were having a blast. LARPers larped next to lowriders and food trucks, power wheels raced, and a good time was had by all.

Inkjet Transfers To Wood

Color Image on wood board

You can’t feed a piece of wood through a stock inkjet printer, and if you could it’s likely the nature of the material would result in less than optimal prints. But [Steve Ramsey] has a tutorial on inkjet transfers to wood over on his YouTube Channel which is a simple two-step method that produces great results. We really love quick tips like this. Steve explains the entire technique while creating an example project – all in under 2 minutes of video. We don’t want to get your hopes up though – this method will only work on porous absorbent surfaces like bare wood, not on PC boards. We’ve featured some great Inject PCB resist methods here in the past though.

The transfer technique is dead simple. [Steve] uses the backing from a used sheet of inkjet labels (the shiny part that normally gets thrown away). He runs the backing sheet through his inkjet printer. Since plastic coated backing sheet isn’t porous, the ink doesn’t soak in and dry. He then presses the still wet page onto a piece of wood. The wet ink is instantly absorbed into the wood. A lacquer clear coat seals the image in and really make the colors pop. We’d like to see how this method would work with other porous materials, like fabrics (though the ink probably wouldn’t survive the washing machine).

Click past the break for another example of [Steve’s] work, and two videos featuring the technique.

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Making Color Matched Perler Bead Art

You may remember Perler beads from first or second grade; these small plastic beads are placed into a peg board and then ironed to produce a solid multicolored piece of plastic. Recently, Perler beads have seen somewhat of a revival due to a few people creating 8 and 16-bit video game sprites in plastic, but there’s still the enormous effort of color matching beads to make a passable Sonic or Mega Man.

[Jon Wilson] sent in an awesome bead pattern generator that takes those color images of video game sprites – and just about any other picture –  and translates them into Perler bead patterns. One awesome feature is color matching; [Jon] found the RGB values of every color of Perler beads and his program chooses the closest match from the original image.

[Jon] started on a GUI app for his bead pattern generator, but because his kids aren’t into beads anymore the GUI is still unfinished. There is a command line Python script that takes an image and shoots out a PDF of the bead pattern, which should be more than enough for all but the most complicated design.