Recreating A Broken Laminated Wooden Furniture Part

Everyone loves those rather bouncy wooden lounge chairs that got popularized by a certain Swedish seller of furniture, but as tough as they are, the laminated wood can still break at some point. The chair that [John’s Furniture Repair] got in for repair had cracked right around where a bolt hole had been drilled, apparently creating a weak spot that over the years turned into a crack.

The way to fix this issue is to recreate the one piece of curved, laminated wood as demonstrated in the video. This starts with tracing the contours of the original part on a piece of MDF, which then gets doubled up by a second plate of MDF. After cutting out the contours this then creates the two halves of a mold for the laminated part.

Next is preparing the layers of wood that will become the new part, making sure to keep the same final thickness as the original. With everything glued up the layers are put into the mold, clamped down and the glue left to dry.

Finally, the part is freed from the mold, cut to its final size, and sanded down to prepare it for final treatment and installation on the lounge chair. Perhaps the only negative one can say about this kind of fix is that after you’re done, you really get that itch to sand down and re-lacquer all of the other parts as well so that they also look new and shiny.

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Junkyard Crossbow Aims To Be A Car Killer

[James], aka [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], is not your typical Hackaday poster boy. Most of his builds have a  “Junkyard Wars” vibe, and he’d clearly be a good man to have around in a zombie apocalypse. Especially if the undead start driving tanks around, for which purpose his current anti-tank compound crossbow is apparently being developed.

At its present prototype phase, [James]’ weapon o’ doom looks more fearsome than it actually is. But that’s OK — we’re all about iterative development here. Using leaf springs from a Toyota Hi-Lux truck, this crossbow can store a lot of energy, which is amplified by ludicrously large aluminum cams. [James] put a lot of effort into designing a stock that can deal with these forces, ending up with a composite design of laminated wood and metal. He put a lot of care into the trigger mechanism too, and the receiver sports not only a custom pistol grip cast from aluminum from his fire extinguisher foundry, but a hand-made Picatinny rail for mounting optics. Test shots near the end of the video below give a hint at the power this fully armed and operational crossbow will eventually have. The goal is to disable a running car by penetrating the engine block, and we’re looking forward to that snuff film.

If rubber band-powered crossbows are more your speed, take you pick — fully automatic, 3D-printed, or human-launching.

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