shbazjinkens had originally linked to Dan’s workshop when commenting on the backyard aluminum foundry. Dan uses a lost foam technique for casting his parts: the foam burns out of the mold to be replaced by metal. To make the initial foam pieces he built this hot wire based foam cutting lathe (out of cast parts natch). Nice little specialized tool that you definitely wouldn’t find easily. Dan is also responsible for the hot air pencil we mentioned the other day. Needless to say, there is a lot of good stuff on his site so have a look around.

Continue reading “Foam Cutting Lathe” →

otherpower.com has a great write up on building and flying this 17 foot monster. The turbine features 25 pounds of magnets in the rotors and 16 pounds of copper wire in the stator. It’s a really interesting process going from bearing assembly, to coil mock-up, resin casting the rotors and stator, blade assembly and finally raising the tower. The result is a turbine that can stand up to winds over 60 mph and has been known to produce 3.8kW. It’s a good project and also fun to read because of all of the warnings about not severing your fingers with high powered magnets.

[thanks John Heylin]

Continue reading “Homebrew Wind Turbine” →

The Crazy J is a completely computer controlled acoustic guitar. Spawned as a Georgia Tech graduate class project it features 6 picks and 23 fingertips. These combine to generate 29 individual notes. The whole setup is controlled through a MIDI interface. There are several sample mp3s on the site. How does it sound? Well, let’s just say I hope in the future our robot overlords can play an instrument without making it sound like a harpsichord.

[thanks nullset]

Continue reading “Mechatronic Guitar” →

Here are some really simple projects for building guitar effects pedals. I mean REALLY simple. I’m sure that a little more than this goes into the brightly colored commercial boxes and there is always room for some gouging. Unfortunately this site seems to have stagnated. I’d like to see more simple effects like this, but I’m guessing the curator got a little burnt out building circuits using pixel art.

[thanks alex]

Continue reading “Guitar Effects Pedals” →

Here’s a good 4th of July project: Chris Garrison sent in his portable peltier based beer cooler. He saw a cheap peltier junction for sale and decided to build a mini-fridge. It holds 14 cans and is portable enough to place wherever needed. He does comment that his power supply isn’t quite up to snuff, but it does a passable job for only spending $35 on the project.

Continue reading “Peltier Beer Cooler” →

Jim sent in his backyard foundry project. This is an improved version of his previous attempt. It uses a large holiday popcorn tin for the main case. This is insulated using perlite mixed with high temperature furnace cement. It can reach upwards of 1200F, but you’ll still be able to touch the outside of the can, briefly.

Yeah, I nearly labeled it “Staff of doomed social life”. John, a Penn state undergrad, whipped together this glowing walking stick. Okay “whipped’ is an understatement; he bothered to model it in Rhino before assembly. So, if you’re bored with building lightsabers or you’re just tired of the balrogs in your basement this is the project for you. Keep up the good work John and for your sake I hope I don’t see “gandalfkid.wmv” in my inbox anytime soon.

[thanks Deepomega]

Continue reading “Staff Of Doom” →