woodgears

7 Articles

Simple Shop-made Taps For Threading Wood

July 24, 2017 by 19 Comments

Wood can be the material of choice for many kinds of projects, but it often falls out of the running in favor of metal or plastic if it needs to take a threaded fastener. But with a little ingenuity you can make your own wood taps and cut threads that will perform great.

Making wood do things that wood isn’t supposed to do is [Matthias Wandel]’s thing. Hackers the world over know and use his wood gears designer to lay out gears for all kinds of projects from musical marble machines to a wooden Antikythera mechanism. Woodworkers have been threading wood for centuries , so making wood take a decent thread isn’t exactly something new. But doing it on the cheap and making the threads clean and solid has always been tricky. The video after the break shows [Matthias]’ method of cutting a tap out of an ordinary threaded rod or even off-the-shelf lag screws. He uses a simple jig to hold the blank so that flutes can be cut with an angle grinder. The taps work well in the materials he tested, and a little informal stress testing at the end of the video shows promise for long service life of the threads.

Wood threads aren’t suitable for every project, but knowing that you can do it might just open the path to a quick, easy build. This is a great tip to keep in mind.

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Solenoid Engine With Woodworking Chops

September 25, 2016 by 28 Comments

Simple, elegant, and well executed. This solenoid engine build is everything we’ve come to love about [Matthias Wandel]’s work. If you don’t recognize his name you probably remember the name of his site: Wood Gears.

In what feels like an afternoon project he put together a solenoid engine. It translates the linear motion of a small solenoid into the circular motion of a flywheel. The only specialized part in this hack is the solenoid. It has a pretty long throw and includes a hinge pin at the end.

The rest is crafted mostly of wood — it is admirable how he uses that table saw like a surgeon uses a scalpel. The wooden components include a base, flywheel, very interesting bearing blocks, and a few mounting brackets to hold everything in just the right place. Add to this a coat hanger for the cam shaft, the internals of a terminal strip for the cam, some heavy gauge wire, and you’re in business. The latter two make up a clever electrical switch that synchronizes the drive of the solenoid with the flywheel.

It’s amusing to hear [Matthias] mention that this engine isn’t very practical. We still think the project has merit — it’s great for learning about how simple an engine can be, and for developing an intuitive appreciation for how great commercially available motors and engines actually are. Plus, if you can mimic these fabrication techniques you can build anything. Great work on this one [Matthias], another thing of beauty!

Check out his video below, then go back and check out his air-powered engine and of course, a hack that actually uses wood gears.

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Matthias Builds A Belt Sander

December 1, 2015 by 26 Comments

[Matthias Wandel] is the preeminent YouTube woodworker, with dozens of machines constructed from wooden gears, amazing machines that produce perfect mortise and tenons, and home-built table saws and jointers. Actually building something instead of buying it is a hallmark of [Matthias]’ channel, and he’s at it again, building his own woodworking machines. This time it’s a 1″ wide belt sander. Of course anyone can go out and simply buy one of these sanders for under $100, but what’s the point in that when you can build one out of plywood and a motor you picked out of the trash?

The design of this belt sander – just like the commercial version he’s improving upon – uses three wheels to guide the 42″ long strip of sandpaper around its course. [Matthias] is using rollerblade wheels for the front wheels. Rollerblade wheels aren’t the best shape for bearings, this can be fixed by using a table saw as a lathe. Yes, [Matthias] lathes with a table saw. He’s just that good.

The rest of the frame was carefully constructed out of plywood and powered by a 1/3 horsepower furnace fan motor pulled from the trash. There are a few interesting features that make this belt sander exceptionally useful: a rounded platen behind the belt makes sanding interior corners very easy, and is something that isn’t usually found on commercial belt sanders.

You can check out [Matthias]’ video below.

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Hexagon Cake Cutting

Cake Knife Tessellates Cake

August 30, 2015 by 17 Comments

Rectangles? Squares? Pie slices? Who says dessert has to come in that shape? Why not triangles, circles, or even hexagons? Master of all things woodworking [Matthias Wandel] decided to solve this problem, and delved into a bit of metal working.

Using a strip of 26 gauge stainless steel, [Matthias] threw together some wood clamps in order to bend the metal into funky looking blade. He then put slits into a nice wooden handle and assembled the whole thing with a very slight positive curve, allowing you to roll the knife as you cut your confectionery.

As you can see in the following video, it works pretty well — and always, it’s a pleasure to see this man work.

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Hackaday Links: February 15, 2015

February 15, 2015 by 6 Comments

[Matthias Wandel], also known as the genius/demigod that can make anything out of wood, put together a mount for a Raspberry Pi and a camera. Yes, it’s just a holder for a Raspi, but some of our readers who aren’t up to speed with [Matthias] might want to check out his Youtube channel. There are hundreds of awesome videos. Report back in a month.

[Evan], the guy working his butt off for the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and the organizer for the Vintage Computer Festival East (we’re going, April 17-19, Wall, NJ) has been working on a book. It’s about mobile computing, and he’s crowdfunding it.

Your keyboard has buttons, and so does and Akai MPC. Daft PunKonsole! Press the space bar for  instrumental part. There is, as yet, no video of someone doing this correctly.

Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and that means Valentine’s Day builds started rolling in on the tip line. Here’s something that’s actually a very simple circuit that’s inspired from an old ‘Electronic Games and Toys’ book by [Len Buckwalter]. Here’s a video of it in action.

A few years ago the name of the game was tiny, credit card-sized ARM boards. It had to come to this: a 64-bit board. ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2GHz. It also costs $120 and only has a gig of RAM, but there you go.

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Hackaday Links: November 2, 2014

November 2, 2014 by 16 Comments

Russians blowing up capacitors! As we all know, electronics only work because of blue smoke. [kreosan] is releasing this blue smoke from a few hundred caps. Fun times, even if they are a large number of inert tube shields in their collection of caps.

[mayhugh1] over on the home model engine machinist forum has built an 18 cylinder radial engine. It’s based on the Hodgson 9-cylinder radial engine that has been around for a while. The crank case is machined from a 5″ diameter rod of aluminum. There’s a Picassa album of the engine being constructed as well.

[Richard] wanted a Minecraft server, but not just any Minecraft server; this one demanded a custom case. A grass block was the inspiration, acrylic the medium, and a quad-core Mini-ITX the guts of the project.

Halloween was last Friday, and as always the tip line filled up with costume builds. [Leif] built a Ghostbusters costume complete with Muon trap, [Jeff] printed out some steampunk post-apocolyptic goggles, and [Green Gentleman] made a death-a-corn, although we’re struggling to figure out why the last one isn’t called an acorn-‘o-lantern.

[Matthias Wandel], a.k.a. the woodgears.ca dude,  is well-known in certain circles for being a wizard of wood. One of the first projects that put him on the map was a pantorouter – a router to cut mortises and tenons. He’s going back to his roots and building a bigger version. This version uses models of routers that are available outside North America, and in the latest video [Matthias] has it dialed in very well.

The Open Source Remote Control was an entry for The Hackaday Prize that didn’t make the final cut. It’s now an indiegogo project, and has some really cool tech we can’t wait to see in mainstream RC transmitters.

Designing A Marble Track From Scratch

July 1, 2013 by 1 Comment

Woodworker extraordinaire [Matthais] was approached by a toy company to create a ‘marble run’ toy. [Matthais]’ jig-building skills are beyond reproach, so whipping up a prototype for this toy was pretty easy for him.

The basic unit of construction for this marble run is a simple ramp block with inputs and outputs at either end. These were crafted from blocks of wood, with the ramp carved out with a slot mortising machine. To make the side cuts on each block, [Matthais] used his pantograph router and a jig that cuts the wood for marble inputs on either side.

After taking his creation to a hackerspace for some very large kids to play with, [Matthais] found a few problems with his initial design. The blocks didn’t want to stay aligned when marbles were moving down the ramps, so a small mortise and tenon – looking very much like a piece of Lego – were added in several locations on the underside of each block.

Making one of something is relatively easy, but [Matthais] is making hundreds of pieces for his marble run prototype, each interchangeable with another. That’s impressive for something crafted by hand, but when you’re a master at making jigs like [Matthais], everything goes by pretty easily.