Category: DIY

Here’s a brilliant set of steampunk goggles on Flickr with step-by-step shots of the building process. Really nice work. Check out some of the other project sets on Mikest’s pages.

I’ve written here, and in several of my books, about trying to save gadgets that have gotten wet. My gist: DON’T TURN IT ON! and let it dry, THOROUGHLY. In today’s MAKE Tools N Tips Newsletter, Joel Young offers an additional bit of advice:

“I’ve revived a couple of soaked laptops and iPods, and if the machine isn’t turning on, you pretty much have to “disassemble it as fully as possible. You can find guides all over the internet. Cole’s Hardware has little screwdriver kits that work well.

“Once it’s apart, you’ll most likely see that the circuits have white sediment on them. I’m not sure what actually causes that to happen, but it causes (temporary) short circuits. If you get some denatured solvent alcohol from a hardware store and wipe the sediment away with cotton swabs and a toothbrush (don’t breathe too deeply–it’s not poisonous, but it is irritating), you should be able to get most, if not all, of the components working again.

“Be careful not to let the display get soaked by anything, including the alcohol, because it won’t function again after that. That’s the part that’s most likely to need replacement, and unfortunately, displays are not cheap. My fiancée’s iPod nano got soaked recently, and I was able to get everything but the display to work–and it costs $50 to get a replacement from a third party. Meh.”

Attention circuit-benders, hardware hackers, techno-antique collectors, control panel enthusiasts, analog synth and Theramin fans, and marvelers of magnificent and mad machinery in general. This link will rock your world.

Tim Kaiser is a performance artist and experimental musician. He’s built dozens (and dozens) of crazy instruments and other sound-generating gadgets, many of them housed in antique Geiger counters, old telephones, Oscillator boxes, and other retro equipment cases. His site features page after page of amazing DIY tech art. I was swooning by the time I was done, and I don’t think I even exhausted the site. It seems to go on forever. Some of the machines have MP3 files attached to them so you can hear what the devices sound like.

One of the most linked-to pieces on Street Tech is the Gallery of Homebrewed Headphone Amps. This is an equally amazing collection of homemade audio gadgets. We can only hope that Tim Kaiser’s work generates a similar buzz.

[Via Brass Goggles]

Man, does our boy Jake von Slatt ever sleep? Seems like he’s crankin’ stuff out of the Steampunk Workshop on a near daily basis.

His latest project should help all of his future projects look even snazzier than they do now. It’s a foamcore and packing tape-special, a light diffuser, used to soften the intensity of camera light flash. And as Jake points out in the project’s intro, light flare can be particularly problematic when shooting a lot of polished brass, as he frequently does.

Check out the results of using the diffuser on his Telegraph Sounder we blogged about last week. Nice!

I’ve always been fascinated by keyboards and the various types of materials and switch technologies that underlie them. This Instructable shows you how to make a cool-looking wallet out of the flexible circuit material used in the typical keyswitch assembly.

It sounds like it’s not the easiest cut n’ fold job you can do, but it looks like you get a very unique, and uniquely nerdy, bit o’ kit out of the effort. Hey, I need me a new wallet. Maybe me and my Leatherman will get Medieval with one of the half dozen old boards I have gathering Radon in the basement.

I finally got a chance to read my issue of MAKE Vol. 9, the Fringe issue, and I think it’s one of the better ones they’ve done. I kind of winced at the Fringe theme, thinking it was going to be a lot of psychic silliness, reinforced by the Kirlian “aura” on the cover. But they do an awesome job of maintaining skepticism and decent B.S. detection, while still being open-minded and not forgetting the fun.

One of the more intriguing pieces in the Fringe section is a piece on the Freemasons, by MAKE’s Project Editor Paul Spinrad. The basic point of the piece is that the Masons started out as a society of geeks, stone masons/ engineers, who knew the “secrets” of cathedral building. He calls this period “operative Masonry.” Over time, more and more members joined who weren’t geeks/engineers and didn’t have any direct experience of the knowledge held in the Order. He calls this “speculative Masonry.” Paul asks the question: Wouldn’t it be cool if geeks reclaimed the Masons by joining in large numbers to a create new generation of operative Masonry, a place where people doing amazing things with technology could get together and share their discoveries? As he points out, the Masons have an amazing infrastructure, with lots of cool resources and swanky Lodge buildings. The Masonic membership is looking very gray these days and some Lodges have allegedly closed down because of dwindling membership.

The amazing Jake von Slatt has struck again. This time, ye olde Steampunk Workshop has cranked out a lovely brass telegraph sounder that taps out the content from RSS feeds in Morse Code. Jake actually made two, the brass model, built on a traditional design, and a second, more whimsical one, cut from cast aluminum (for “Airship Duty”).

One of the things I like about Jake’s pieces is that he includes video tutorials that can be applied outside of the specific project he’s building. For this project, he covers using a Tap and Die Set and how to wind an induction coil using an electric drill.

Our pal I-Wei of Crabfu has created another amazing steam-driven contraption, this one a “beetle” built on a Tamiya High-Lift Chassis and an aluminum sheet metal “shell.” He goes into a decent amount of detail on the construction, with lots of pics, and there’s also a video of the mechano-critter in action. Like all of I-Wei’s work, this vehicle is gorgeous, and includes such wonderful whimsical details as sheet-metal wings that open out to reveal the Cheddar Pegasus steam engine and steamworks underneath.

A while back, we blogged about a Robosapien outfitted with a CoilGun. Now the builder of that gun has posted step-by-step details of how he did it.

The Instructables Cool Projects Newsletter hipped us to this Van de Graff Generator made with little more than a lightbulb, a hunk of wood, a toy DC motor, a rubber band, some plastic pipe, and a 9V battery.