vintage sign

2 Articles

A man cutting wood with a circular bench saw

Ultimate Picture Frame Combines Walnut And 3D Printing

January 28, 2026 by 7 Comments

[Make Something] boasts he has made probably the fanciest picture frame you’ll ever see. He started with an original sign purchased on eBay and then made it to be bigger, brighter, and better. The frame is of solid walnut with back-lighting for the imagery all chasing that classic mid-century modern style. The backlit photo was taken the “hard way”, with an actual film camera and a road-trip to the picturesque site at Yellowstone. [Make Something] then developed the film himself in his home studio.

For the chimney [Make Something] used a new trick he learned in Autodesk Fusion: you take a photo of an object, convert to black and white, and then use the light/dark values to emboss or deboss a surface. To do this he took photos of the brick wall outside his shop and used that as the basis of the textured chimney he made with his 3D printer.

If you’re interested in other projects made from solid walnut, check out 3D Printed Spirograph Makes Art Out Of Walnut and Walnut Case Sets This Custom Arduino-Powered RPN Calculator Apart From The Crowd.

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Writing A Message In Hypnotizing Style

October 13, 2014 by 19 Comments

If you’ve ever encountered a rapidly spinning split-flap displays at an airport terminal, it’s hard not to stop and marvel at them in action for a few extra seconds. Because of this same fascination, [M1k3y] began restoring an old one-hundred and twenty character sign, which he outlines the process of on his blog.

Finding documentation on this old relic turned out to be an impossibility; the producers of the model themselves didn’t even keep it off-hand any longer. In spite of that, [M1k3y] was able to determine the function of the small amount of circuitry driving the sign through process of elimination by studying the components. After nearly a year of poking at it, he happened across a video by the Trollhöhle Compute Club, demonstrating the successful use of the same display model. Luckily, they were kind enough to share their working source code. By reverse engineering the serial protocol in their example, he was able to write his own software to get the sign moving at last.

Once up and running, [M1k3y] learned that only eighty of the sign’s characters were still operable, but that is plenty to make a mesmerizing statement! Here is a video of the cycling letters in action:

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