Building A Hammond Organ To Understand How They Work

August 21, 2026 by Tyler August 27 Comments

The Hammond organ is an early form of electronic– or perhaps electromechanical– musical instrument. It solved the very real problem of organs normally being the sort of thing you built into a cathedral, allowing a similar sound to fit into a piano-like form factor. Their workings are a so simple that it’s hard to wrap your head around it actually working– which is why [Uri Tuchman] built one on YouTube. Also for a gift exchange, but we’re not Santa, here– we’re here to learn, and [Uri] does not disappoint.

[Uri]’s organ is a bit smaller than what the Hammond corporation was putting out back in the day, just one hand-cranked octave– and it lacks the distinct spinning speaker in favour of plugging into any old guitar amp. It’s enough to get the idea across. Each of the twelve keys acts as a simple switch, wired to a pickup made from a coil of wire around a steel rod– much like a magnetic pickup on an electric guitar. The pickup faces the tone wheel, which is the part that feels like magic: the tonewheel spinning past the pickup acts exactly like the steel string vibrating in an electric guitar, its ferroelectric motions inducing a tiny current. The tonewheels smooth teeth are spaced to create sine waves at the frequencies corresponding to each key, so it has to be exact. That’s why while the rest of the brass-and-wood build is [Uri]’s beautiful craftsmanship, the iron tonewheels are CNC’d.

Aside from the amp it is plugged into, there are no electronics here. There’s nothing to double or otherwise alter the frequencies: one key means one tonewheel– twelve for this build– and if the RPMs are off everything is out of tune. Good thing [Uri] made it hand-cranked! Well, it is for a gift exchange. Maybe it’s a white elephant sort of thing, because we can only imagine that making it much harder to play. On the other hand, [Uri] demonstrates some neat effects by varying the RPM at the end of the video, so perhaps that’s a feature.

As nice as [Uri]’s work is, Hammond Organ Company filmed the construction themselves, back in the day if you want to see the true quill. Alternatively, you can get more of [Uri]’s craftsmanship with this square guitar.

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From Scrappy Pallet Wood To Fancy Tea Tray

June 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Pallets are a wonderful way to package goods and move them around, but especially the wooden ones have a very finite lifespan. This means that many of them are discarded every day, even though there is still good wood on them. Even if it’s not the highest quality wood, you can still use it for some nice wooden items, like the tea tray that [GR Woodworking] recently put together.

The reclaimed wood is the typical fast-growing, soft type, with the suspicion of it being paulownia here. Of course, wooden pallets use a wide variety of wood varieties, so not all reclaimed wood is equally suitable for applications like this, and identifying the type can be a challenge in itself.

In the video it’s shown how the wood is planed to make it smooth and straight, before the joints are created and it is married to the poplar or aspen base plate. Of note is that absolutely no power tools or bulky things like router tables are used here, just basic hand tools that should make this kind of woodworking accessible to people even without that kitted-out woodworking shop.

After assembly it’s finished with Vararhana oil-based stain to give it a darker look and really bring out the grain. Naturally, since it’s a tea tray it has to be commissioned with a proper tea ceremony, which it passes with flying colors.

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Burning Wood To Brew Wood To Preserve Wood : Pine Tar

April 3, 2026 by Tyler August 9 Comments

Before there was pressure-treated wood, before modern paints, there was pine tar. Everything from tool handles to wagons to ships were made of wood preserved with pine tar, once upon a time, and [woodbrew] wants to show you how to make it, how to use it, and why you might put it on your skin.

It starts with, you guessed it, pine! In the first part of the video, [woodbrew] creates a skin salve with pine resin and food-safe oil. The pine resin–which is the sticky goop that dries around wounds on evergreen trees–is highly antiseptic and has been used in wound salves since the stone age. The process is easy: melt it in a double boiler, then mix with equal parts oil. [woodbrew] also adds a touch of beeswax to firm it up, an a little eucalyptus extract for extra germ-killing power, and a nice smell to boot.

That’ll preserve your hands, but what about preserving wood? That starts at about 9 minutes in, and for that you’re going to need a lot more resin, so picking it off wounded trees like he does at the start of the video won’t work. [woodbrew] suggests starting with dead-or-dying pines, and harvesting the crooks of their branches for “fatwood” — wood with the highest resin content. He also suggests the center of stumps, again of trees that died or were severely injured before being cut down. Then it’s a matter of cooking those fine organic molecules out. This is where we burn the wood to save the wood. Well, to save other wood. Wood we didn’t burn, obviously.

The distillation process [woodbrew] uses it fairly traditional, and consists of a couple of buckets. One bucket is buried and collects the pine tar; the other, with holes in the bottom to allow the tar to drip out, is filled with fatwood and covered tightly before being surrounded by firewood which is set alight. You could use an alternate source of heat here, but if you just cut down a pine tree for its fatwood, well, you’d have the rest of the tree to work with. Inside the fatwood bucket, the heat of the fire cooks off the volatile compounds that make pine tar, while the lack of oxygen from being closed up keeps it from burning. Burying the collection bucket keeps it from getting so hot the volatiles all boil off.

If this sounds like the process for making charcoal or woodgas, that’s because it is! He’s letting the gas fraction flare off here, but you could probably capture it– though a true gasifier brakes the tar down into gaseous compounds as well. The charcoal of course stays in the bucket as a bonus.

To make it usable as a wood finish, [woodbrew] mixes his homemade pine tar 50:50 with linseed oil, thining it to a spreadable consistency that helps it penetrate deep into the wood. By filling the voids in the wood, this mixture will help keep moisture out, and the antiseptic properties of the organic soup that is pine tar will help keep fungi at bay for potentially decades to come.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

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Have You Ever Used A Tick Stick?

February 28, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

Picture this: you have an irregular opening you need to fabricate a piece to fill. Maybe it’s the stonework of a fireplace; maybe it’s the curved bulkhead of a ship. How do you get that shape? The most “Hackaday” answer would be to 3D scan the area, create a CAD model based on the point cloud, and route the shape with CNC. Of course, none of those were options for the entirety of human history. So how do you do it if you don’t have such high-tech toys? With a stick, as [Essential Craftsman] takes great pains to show us in the video below.

It’s not just any stick, of course. Call it a “tick stick”, a “speil stick”, or a “joggle stick” — whatever you call it, it’s just an irregularly shaped piece of wood. The irregular shape is key to the whole process. How you use it is simple: get some kind of storyboard — cardboard, MDF, whatever — that fits inside your irregular void. Thanks to the magic of the stick, it need not fit flush to the edges of the hole. You put the tick stick on the storyboard, press the pointy end against a reference point on the side of the hole, and trace the stick. The irregular shape means you’re going to be able to get that reference point back exactly later. Number the outline you just made, and rinse and repeat until you’ve got a single-plane “point cloud” made of tick stick outlines.

Your storyboard is probably going to look mighty confusing, but that’s what the numbers are for. Bring your storyboard and your tick stick onto the workbench and whatever you want to cut out– plywood, cardboard, 1/4″ steel armor plate, you name it–and simply repeat the process. Put the tick stick inside outline #1 and mark where the pointy end lands on the material. Then do it again for the other outlines, reproducing the points you measured on the original piece. After that, it’s just a game of ‘connect the dots’ and cutting with whatever methodology works for your substrate. A sharp knife will work for cardboard, but you’ll probably want something more substantial for steel plate.

It’s not often you’re going to need the tick stick– the [Craftsman] reports only needing it a few times over the course of a decades-long career, but when you need it, there’s not much else that will do the job. Well, unless you have a 3D scanner handy, that is. Continue reading “Have You Ever Used A Tick Stick?” →

All Projections Suck, So Play Risk On A Globe Instead

December 30, 2025 by Tyler August 11 Comments

The worst thing about the getting people together is when everyone starts fighting over their favourite map projection– maybe you like the Watterman Butterfly, but your cousin really digs Gall-Peters, and that one Uncle who insists on defending Mercator after a couple of beers. Over on Instructables [madkins9] has an answer to that problem that will still let you play a rousing game of Risk– which will surely not drag on into the night and cause further drama– skip the projection, and put the game on a globe.

The pieces are from a 1960s version. The abstract tokens have a certain charm the modern ones lack.

Most globes, being cardboard, aren’t amenable to having game pieces cling to them. [madkins9] thus fabricates a steel globe from a pair of pre-purchased hemispheres. Magnets firmly affixed to the bases of all game pieces allow them to stick firmly to the spherical play surface. In a “learn from my mistakes” moment, [madkins] suggests that if you use two pre-made hemispheres, as he did, you make sure they balance before welding and painting them.

While those of us with less artistic flair might be tempted to try something like a giant eggbot, [madkins] was able to transfer the Risk world map onto his globe by hand. Many coats of urethane mean it should be well protected from the clicking or sliding magnet pieces, no matter how long the game lasts. In another teachable moment, he suggests not using that sealer over sharpie. Good to know.

Once gameplay is finished, the wooden globe stand doubles as a handsome base to hold all the cards and pieces until the next time you want to end friendships over imaginary world domination. Perhaps try a friendly game of Settlers of Catan instead.

Jointly Is A Typeface Designed For CNC Joinery

September 16, 2025 by Tyler August 23 Comments

If you have a CNC router, you know you can engrave just about any text with the right tool, but Jointly is a typeface that isn’t meant to be engraved. That would be too easy for [CobyUnger]. His typeface “Jointly” is the first we’ve seen that’s meant to be used as joinery.

The idea is simple: carve mortises that take the shape of letters in one piece, and carve matching letter-tenons into the end of another. Push them together, and voila: a joint! To get this concept to work reliably, the font did have to be specially designed — both the inner and outer contours need to be accessible to a rotary cutting tool. Cutting tools get harder to use the smaller they go (or more fragile, at any rate) so with Jointly, the design spec was that any letters over 3/4″ (19.05 mm) tall needed to be handled with a 1/8″ (3.175 mm) rotary cutter.

This gives the font a friendly curved appearance we find quite fetching. Of course if you’re going to be cutting tenons into the end of a board, you’re going to need either some serious z-depth or an interesting jig to get the end of the board under the cutting head. It looks like [CobyUnger] has both, but he mentions the possibility of using a handheld CNC router as the cheaper option.

Speaking of routing out type, do you know the story of Gorton? You can’t make joinery with that typeface, but you’ve almost certainly seen it.

A before and after with the plank of wood shown and the resulting chair also shown.

Liberating A Collapsible Chair From A Single Piece Of Wood

August 15, 2025 by John Elliot V 11 Comments

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [GrandpaAmu] liberates a collapsible chair from a single piece of wood.

With the assistance of an extra pair of hands, but without any power tools in sight, this old master marks up a piece of wood and then cuts a collapsible chair out of it. He uses various types of saw, chisels, a manual drill, and various other hand tools. His workspace is a humble plank with a large clamp attached. At the end he does use a powered hot air gun to heat the finish he uses to coat the final product.

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