A booted foot is seen descending on a foot pedal attached to a lever underneath a three-legged stand. Three levers extend from the legs, each with a wheel on it, and attach to the central foot plate.

Building A Vise Stand With Pen-Like Retracting Wheels

April 5, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 3 Comments

Old shop tools have a reputation for resilience and sturdiness, and though some of this is due to survivorship bias, some of it certainly comes down to an abundance of cast iron. The vise which [Marius Hornberger] recently restored is no exception, which made a good stand indispensable; it needed to be mobile for use throughout the shop, yet stay firmly in place under significant force. To do this, he built a stand with a pen-like locking mechanism to deploy and retract some caster wheels.

Most of the video goes over the construction of the rest of the stand, which is interesting in itself; the stand has an adjustable height, which required [Marius] to construct two interlocking center columns with a threaded adjustment mechanism. The three legs of the stand were welded out of square tubing, and the wheels are mounted on levers attached to the inside of the legs. One of the levers is longer and has a foot pedal that can be pressed down to extend all the casters and lock them in place. A second press on the pedal unlocks the levers, which are pulled up by springs. The locking mechanism is based on a cam that blocks or allows motion depending on its rotation; each press down rotates it a bit. This mechanism, like most parts of the stand, was laser-cut and laser-welded (if you want to skip ahead to its construction, it begins at about 29:00).

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Real World Race Track Is Real Hack

June 22, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 16 Comments

[Rulof] never ceases to impress us with what he comes up with and how he hacks it together. Seriously, how did he even know that the obscure umbrella part he used in this project existed, let alone thought of it when the time came to make a magnet mount? His hack this time is a real world, tabletop race track made for his little brother, and by his account, his brother is going crazy for it.

His race track is on a rotating table and consists of the following collection of parts: a motor, bicycle wheel, casters from a travel bag, rubber bands (where did he get such large ones?), toy car and steering wheel from his brother, skateboard wheels, the aforementioned umbrella part and hard drive magnets. In the video below we like how he paints the track surface by holding his paint brush fixed in place and letting the track rotate under it.

From the video you can see the race track has got [Rulof] hooked. Hopefully he lets his brother have ample turns too, but we’re not too sure. Some additions we can imagine would be robotics for the obstacles, lighting, sounds and a few simulated explosion effects (puffs of flour?).

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Giant Spirograph Delights Children, Dwarfs Banana

July 29, 2014 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

giant spirograph Late last year at a craft show, [hahabird] and a friend came across a laser-cut Spirograph and they both had a go at it. After mocking his friend’s lack of fine motor skills, [hahabird] was struck with the idea of making a giant-scale Spirograph that would (hopefully) be less frustrating for kids of all ages.

He generated the gears using an InkScape plugin, and then moved the project to Illustrator for adjustments. After nesting the inner gear drawings, he was able to print them out on one 3×3′ piece of paper at the local FedEx-Kinko’s. To make a template for routing he pieces that make up the eight-foot diameter outer ring, [hahabird] first cut it out of MDF and then bolted that to plywood. The outer ring’s size was dictated by the number of sections that fit on a 4×8 piece of plywood.

The challenge of the inner cogs was to make them move smoothly and still mesh with the teeth of the outer ring. [hahabird] solved this by mounting casters on raised platforms, which double nicely as handles. Each inner cog has a series of PVC couplers that take the 1″ PVC chalk holder insert.

So far, [hahabird] has cut 22-, 35-, and 44-tooth cogs, all of which are painted in nice, bright colors. According to his reddit comments, he will have a video or gif of it in a few days. We hope he makes the plus sign cog and the tongue depressor piece, too.