Sand Casting Motorcycle Cases

Sand casting has been around since, well, since a really really long time ago. For thousands of years, people have been pouring molten metal into finely crafted sand casts, and there’s really no reason that someone can’t do the same thing in their garage or workshop today. This article covers the process of sand casting new case parts for antique Indian motorcycles.  In this instance, the parts were not only very difficult to find, the author also wanted to modify the design completely.

Though there are a few terms that pop up with which we’re unfamiliar, the process seems pretty straightforward. You build a model of what you want, you create the sand cast from the model, you fill the cast with molten metal. Done. In some cases, depending on the level of precision needed, you may need some machining done afterward. However, in many cases things don’t have to be quite so exact.

[via Matthew Van Arsdale]

Bassoforte And Other New Instruments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhp6P9Ygsoc]

[Diego Stocco] makes music with instruments he assembled. For instance, his Bassoforte uses piano keys, the neck and strings from an electric bass, and what look like some cymbals. Throw in a hammer from that piano and a double bass bow (plus heavy use of audio software) and he’s in business. Big business actually, his work has been in video games such as The Conduit and in feature films like Sherlock Holmes where he worked with Hans Zimmer. Bassoforte isn’t his only invention, he’s got several more including the Experibass string family on one instrument, the Light Controlled Oscillator, and sand music using the fine aggregate along with some piezoelectric film transducers.

[Thanks LuciusMare]

3D Printing On A Much Larger Scale

The end goal of this giant rapid prototyping machine is to print buildings. We’re not holding our breath for a brand new Flintstones-esque abode, but their whimsical suggesting of printed buildings on the moon seems like science fiction with potential. The machine operates similar to a RepRap but instead of plastic parts, it prints stone by binding sand with epoxy. This method is not revolutionary, but hasn’t really been seen in applications larger than a square meter or so. It’s fun to see the things we dabble in heading for industrial production applications.

[Thanks Juan]

Beach Stereo

[Adam] wanted a stereo that could stand up to rain and keep sand out. He ended up building this beach stereo out of a cooler. The cooler’s already made to be water tight. He cut holes in the front and back for marine speakers and added a water-tight bezel and cover for the controls on the deck. Inside you’ll find a marine battery to power the unit. Now he and his friends can rock-out even in poor weather thanks to this portable and rugged unit.

Wine Glass Time Keeper

We’ve seen a glut of time-keeping projects lately. We guess time was the original motivator for technology so we’re okay with it (but we’re not calling ourselves Clockaday quite yet). This clock, or more appropriately this timer, is a homemade hourglass that [Andrei] put together. The finished look is simple but he put some real time into its production.

The glass portion is a combination of two wine glasses. He removed the stems, ground the bottoms flat, then drilled holes to allow the sand to pass. He used plumbers putty around the top of the upturned reservoir to create a temporary bowl of water which cooled the glass during drilling. This prevented cracking by keeping the friction generated heat at bay. Working with the glass took a total of around five hours.

To assemble, he epoxied the two wine glasses together, routed out a ring in the wood bases for the lips, and used dowels to connect the two ends. [Andrei] concluded that the gentle slope at the bottom of the wine glasses is not the ideal shape as some sand can get stuck in them. Perhaps champagne flutes for his next build? At any rate, we think it’s a unique, non-automated hourglass build.

A Random USB… Hourglass

[Peter] thought of a creative, way to generate random entropy for under $100.

The USB Hourglass combines a sand timer with a rotating mechanism and an optical beam through the center of the timer to observe the falling sand. The amount of light reaching a detector is digitized at frequent intervals and processed by a microcontroller to determine when to rotate the hourglass. The digitized light levels are also sent by USB to a host PC where they can be used as a source of random entropy. Power is supplied over the USB cable.

With the USB Hourglass, the user can look at the sand falling through the center of the hourglass and monitor the randomness in the USB output data. And one can read the code line-by-line, compile it, and upload it to the microcontroller using only open-source and widely supported tools.