A Wood Chipper From First Principles

June 28, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

For whatever reason, certain pieces of technology can have a difficult time interacting with the physical world. Anyone who has ever used a printer or copier can attest to this, as can anyone whose robot vacuum failed to detect certain types of non-vacuumable waste in their path, making a simple problem much worse. Farm equipment often falls into this category as well, where often complex machinery needs an inordinate amount of maintenance and repair just to operate normally. Wood chippers specifically seem to always get jammed or not work at all, so [Homemade Inventions] took a shot at building one on their own.

To build this screw-based wood chipper, the first thing to fabricate is the screw mechanism itself. A number of circles of thick steel were cut out and then shaped into pieces resembling large lock washers. These were then installed on a shaft and welded end-to-end, creating the helical screw mechanism. With the “threads” of the screw sharpened it is placed into a cylinder with a port cut out to feed the wood into. Powering the screw is a 3 kW electric motor paired with a custom 7:1 gearbox, spinning the screw at around 200 rpm. With that, [Homemade Inventions] has been able to easily chip branches up to 5 centimeters thick, and theorizes that it could chip branches even thicker than that.

Of course, wood chippers are among the more dangerous tools that are easily available to anyone with enough money to buy one or enough skill to build one, along with chainsaws, angle grinders, and table saws, so make sure to take appropriate safety precautions when using or building any of these things. Of course, knowing the dangers of these tools have led to people attempting to make safer versions like this self-propelled chainsaw mill or the semi-controversial table saw safety standard.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

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Drilling Rig Makes Accurate Holes In Seconds

November 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Drilling holes can be quite time consuming work, particularly if you have to drill a lot of them. Think about all the hassle of grabbing a part, fixturing it in the drill press, lining it up, double checking, and then finally making the hole. That takes some time, and that’s no good if you’ve got lots of parts to drill. There’s an easy way around that, though. Build yourself a rad jig like [izzy swan] did.

The first jig we get to see is simple. It has a wooden platter, which hosts a fixture for a plastic enclosure to slot perfectly into place. Also on the platter is a regular old power drill. The platter also has a crank handle which, when pulled, pivots the platter, runs the power drill, and forces it through the enclosure in the exact right spot. It’s makes drilling a hole in the enclosure a repeatable operation that takes just a couple of seconds. The jig gets it right every time.

The video gets better from there, though. We get to see even niftier jigs that feature multiple drills, all doing their thing in concert with just one pull of a lever. [izzy] then shows us how these jigs are built from the ground up. It’s compelling stuff.

If you’re doing any sort of DIY manufacturing in real numbers, you’ve probably had to drill a lot of holes before. Jig making skills could really help you if that’s the case. Video after the break.

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Producing An Exquisite Wooden Keyboard

November 1, 2024 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

Keyboards! They’ve been almost universally made out of plastic since the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, wood is a rather desirable material and it lends itself rather well to touch-heavy human interface devices. As [ProcessX] shows us, though, it can take quite a bit of work to fabricate a keyboard entirely out of this material.

The video shows us the construction of a Japanese wooden keyboard from Hacoa, which retails for around $1000 USD. The video shows us how the wooden housing is produced from start to finish, beginning with the selection of some fine walnut. From there, we get to see how the frame is routed out and machined, along with the more delicate work to create all the keycaps out of wood, too. They’re laser engraved to give them high-quality markings that will last the test of time. What we don’t see is the construction of the electronics—it appears that’s handled separately, and the wooden frame and keycaps are then assembled around the otherwise complete existing keyboard.

It’s nice to see what it takes to produce commercial-quality parts like this out of wood. We’ve seen other wooden keyboard builds before, too.

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Embossing Graphics By 3D Printing On Wood

September 19, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

Embossing (making raised shapes) and debossing (making sunken shapes) on 3D-printed surfaces is not a new idea; we do it all the time. [Cory] from Vancouver Hack Space was playing around with 3D printing on wood, and came up with the idea of creating raised tactile surfaces using a simple transfer process.

We don’t often try to print directly onto a wooden surface for various reasons, but [Cory] wanted to give it a go. They hoped to get some grain patterns to transfer to the surface, but as they say in the blog entry, the beauty of wood patterns is in the colouration, which doesn’t transfer. Next, they laser etched a logo into the wood surface to see how well that would transfer. It did create a discernable raised impression, but they forgot to mirror the image (oops!) and relevel the bed, so the results are less impressive than they could be. Still, it’s another useful technique to consider.

Embossing is the process by which braille sheets are made. This DIY braille encoder is pretty sweet. Of course, the process can simply be decorative. Here’s how to use a laser cutter to create your own embossing seals. The traditional way to emboss paper for a fancy effect was to use embossing powder to selectively change the properties of drying paper. But how can you make the stuff for cheap?

Ultra-Black Material, Sustainably Made From Wood

September 2, 2024 by Donald Papp 40 Comments

Researchers at the University of British Columbia leveraged an unusual discovery into ultra-black material made from wood. The deep, dark black is not the result of any sort of dye or surface coating; it’s structural change to the wood itself that causes it to swallow up at least 99% of incoming light.

One of a number of prototypes for watch faces and jewelry.

The discovery was partially accidental, as researchers happened upon it while looking at using high-energy plasma etching to machine the surface of wood in order to improve it’s water resistance. In the process of doing so, they discovered that with the right process applied to the right thickness and orientation of wood grain, the plasma treatment resulted in a surprisingly dark end result. Fresh from the plasma chamber, a wood sample has a thin coating of white powder that, once removed, reveals an ultra-black surface.

The resulting material has been dubbed Nxylon (the name comes from mashing together Nyx, the Greek goddess of darkness, with xylon the Greek word for wood) and has been prototyped into watch faces and jewelry. It’s made from natural materials, the treatment doesn’t create or involve nasty waste, and it’s an economical process. For more information, check out UBC’s press release.

You have probably heard about Vantablack (and how you can’t buy any) and artist Stuart Semple’s ongoing efforts at making ever-darker and accessible black paint. Blacker than black has applications in optical instruments and is a compelling thing in the art world. It’s also very unusual to see an ultra-black anything that isn’t the result of a pigment or surface coating.

Welding Wood Is As Simple As Rubbing Two Sticks Together

July 21, 2024 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Can you weld wood? It seems like a silly question — if you throw a couple of pieces of oak on the welding table and whip out the TIG torch, you know nothing is going to happen. But as [Action Lab] shows us in the video below, welding wood is technically possible, if not very practical.

Since experiments like this sometimes try to stretch things a bit, it probably pays to define welding as a process that melts two materials at their interface and fuses them together as the molten material solidifies. That would seem to pose a problem for wood, which just burns when heated. But as [Action Lab] points out, it’s the volatile gases released from wood as it is heated that actually burn, and the natural polymers that are decomposed by the heat to release these gases have a glass transition temperature just like any other polymer. You just have to heat wood enough to reach that temperature without actually bursting the wood into flames.

His answer is one of the oldest technologies we have: rubbing two sticks together. By chucking a hardwood peg into a hand drill and spinning it into a slightly undersized hole in a stick of oak, he created enough heat and pressure to partially melt the polymers at the interface. When allowed to cool, the polymers fuse together, and voila! Welded wood. Cutting his welded wood along the joint reveals a thin layer of material that obviously underwent a phase change, so he dug into this phenomenon a bit and discovered research into melting and welding wood, which concludes that the melted material is primarily lignin, a phenolic biopolymer found in the cell walls of wood.

[Action Lab] follows up with an experiment where he heats bent wood in a vacuum chamber with a laser to lock the bend in place. The experiment was somewhat less convincing but got us thinking about other ways to exclude oxygen from the “weld pool,” such as flooding the area with argon. That’s exactly what’s done in TIG welding, after all. Continue reading “Welding Wood Is As Simple As Rubbing Two Sticks Together” →

Automation Makes Traditional Japanese Wood Finishing Easier

March 28, 2024 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Unless you move in architectural circles, you might never have heard of Yakisugi. But as a fence builder, [Lucas] over at Cranktown City sure has, with high-end clients requesting the traditional Japanese wood-finishing method, which requires the outer surface of the wood to be lightly charred. It’s a fantastic look, but it’s a pain to do manually. So, why not automate it?

Now, before we get into a whole thing here, [Lucas] himself notes that what he’s doing isn’t strictly Yakisugi. That would require the use of cypress wood, and charring only one side, neither of which would work for his fence clients. Rather, he’s using regular dimensional lumber which is probably Douglas fir. But the look he’s going for is close enough to traditional Yakisugi that the difference is academic.

To automate the process of burning the wood and subsequently brushing off the loose char, [Lucas] designed a double-barreled propane burner and placed it inside a roughly elliptical chamber big enough to pass a 2×8 — sorry, metric fans; we have no idea how you do dimensional lumber. The board rides through the chamber on a DIY conveyor track, with flame swirling around both sides of the board for an even char. After that, a pair of counter-rotating brushes abrade off the top layer of char, revealing a beautiful, dark finish with swirls of dark grain on a lighter background.

[Lucas] doesn’t mention how much wood he’s able to process with this setup, but it seems a lot easier than the manual equivalent, and likely yields better results. Either way, the results are fantastic, and we suspect once people see his work he’ll be getting more than enough jobs to justify the investment.

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