Want to make an electric guitar from junk? Ranjit will teach you. There are still some spots left in his Electric Junk Guitar class Etsy labs in Brooklyn on The 30th (Wednesday). Sign up here!
The electric guitar is a sophisticated and highly evolved instrument. But, you can make your own out of a few bucks worth of junk and parts. Learn to wind your own guitar pickups and build them into a simple one- or two-string junk guitar with a surprisingly nice sound. Depending on your ambition and experience, you can make your junk guitar as simple or as sophisticated as you want, but everybody is guaranteed to go home with at least a fun twangy noisemaker.
Electric Junk Guitar Class
July 30, 2008
6:30-9pm
Etsy Labs, 325 Gold Street 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201
In response to our high power rocket post, Ken Denmead of GeekDad points us to coverage on their blog of the Rocket Mavericks event, with some awesome pics. The first one above is a time-lapsed night photo. The author of the piece, Steve Jurvetson, writes:
...the motor failed, and broke the rocket in two, but the avionics computer survived in the upper section, popping the parachute as programmed, and the blinky-LED nose cone drifted back to the playa like a spiral candy cane in the sky.
The second image is a rocket powered by a Q motor. That, claims the author, is equivalent to 64,000 Estes-type motors (what size Estes motors?) or four times the total thrust of a Cruise Missile booster! Unfortunately, the home-brewed motor had an air pocket in it and ruptured under pressure. Last year, this same builder launched a similar rocket at BALLS to over 31,000 feet! Here's a vid capture of the apogee.
After some R/C boating inspiration member evilsigntist went to work on a faux-feathered version -
I ended up buying a pair of duck decoys at the local flea market for $10. These are intended to be used by duck hunters to lure unsuspecting water foul within blasting range. When researching what kind of cheap R/C boat I could find to tear apart and reassemble into the duck, I found the yellow 10" submarine at RadioShack on sale for $20. They are available in two different channel frequencies, so I bought one of each, (excited now that I might be able to make two!). So now all I had to do was figure out a way to connect the ducks to the submarines in a fashion that would allow them to look and float like real ducks.
Flickr member callum_robey keeps his ears warm, well-fed, and stylishly dressed -
I made these for snowboarding a few years ago and recently found them while tidying. I chopped a pair of headphones into the ear pieces of these pink fuzzy earmuffs and shortened the headphone cable. An iPod shuffle fits in one side of the muffs which means no cables.
Gareth just posted about Kevin Kelly's review of our Chemistry book "The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments" but one thing that really caught my attention (and Dale pointed it out too) was this awesome quote "Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is a fantastic teacher for chemical literacy. It will show you or your kids how to work with chemicals, and why they are fun." Specifically "chemical literacy" -- sounds great and everyone should have it, I want it as a T-shirt.
Curious about exploring the glitchy goodness of the now-classic Speak & Spell learning toy but not quite ready to crack it open and get to the soldering? Perhaps the above how-to will be enough to whet your appetite. [via Matrixsynth]
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Over on Cool Tool, Kevin Kelly has written a great review of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. In the piece, Kevin also talks about the amazing and long out of print Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (1960), which many of us remember from our youth. He writes:
The Golden Book encouraged playing around with molecules, with no agenda beyond demonstrating the power, principles, and diversity of chemical reactions. The Illustrated Guide on the other hand is a basement laboratory manual meant to teach you the basic working principles of chemistry. How to mix a molar solution. How to titrate. How to do quantitative sleuthing. It claims that if you go through all the chapters you'll be prepared to pass the college-level AP Chem Lab test. You would also be able to work in most laboratories. And of course, you would probably be able to follow most chemistry recipes from the internet, or at least to figure out what you need to make something chemistry-wise.
At the very least, this book should help cure any hysteria you -- or your kids -- might have about CHEMICALS. Sure, they can be dangerous, like your car. But we are surrounded by chemicals, and the only way to understand their real risks is to mess around with them.
...
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments is a fantastic teacher for chemical literacy. It will show you or your kids how to work with chemicals, and why they are fun. Some of the experiments are visually entertaining. Others are scientifically important. It's got wise advice about the few bits of equipment you'll need for your lab. The Illustrated Guide very handily provides substitutions for ingredients whenever possible, so you can work around harder to acquire or expensive chemicals and gear. And it very conscientiously gives proper disposal instructions for substances at the end (the first I've ever seen in a chem book). The author is thrifty, using no more stuff then necessary, and always suggesting ways to purchase the minimum equipment.
For students, DIY hobbyists, and science buffs, who can no longer get real chemistry sets, this one-of-a-kind guide explains how to set up and use a home chemistry lab, with step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in basic chemistry. Learn how to smelt copper, purify alcohol, synthesize rayon, test for drugs and poisons, and much more. The book includes lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab, along with 17 hands-on chapters that include multiple laboratory sessions.
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In response to my posting of the hat-i-fied version of the Bleep Labs' ThingamaKIT, MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder emailed me this cover from a 1949 Hugo Gernsbeck pub, Radio - Electronics. Thanks, Mark!
Skip to 50 seconds in the video and check out the homemade NASCAR simulator and then a homemade flight sim!... The maker writes...
"built from pvc pipe ,junk, spare parts, engineering findings and driven by 4 modified industrial vacum cleaner motors. off a 12 volt car battery. it will run any game made, as it's really just a sit-in force feedback motorized joystick...."
The maker also sent in...
*The flight Sim Project:* You ever have a dream that just once, you could really make something crazy-- something completely unrealistic, something that would be really COOL?
My dream, and as dreams tend to rub off on people, the dream of the group of guys our Girlfriends and wives call "The Lost Boys". we get together during weekends , bring our computers hook up to the LAN and play computer games, browse the internet, or whatever suits us, and between rounds of running in an online "Nascar 3" race (a racing game that can be played over the internet) I was browsing web pages, under Driving simulators.
This search led me to some obvious places, a page to Star tours, to a company that make those devices, to the simulators at NASA and Whitesands naval air base, and I came across a tiny reference to acesim,a home built flight motion cockpit. I'm thinking to my self, self, that's pretty cool, I should build one of these.... I showed it to Jerry Storvik, who is a ex-rececar driver and owner of a Dental Vacuum suction manufacturing company, and he decided that is was indeed, really cool, and that it really needed to be fully enclosed, and bigger, and stronger, and be able to rotate in any direction, and motorized... etc.....
Thus our sim was conceived, the following links take you to the various days we spent building the device, and doing testing and adjustments to it.. anyway, its a very cool thing, if I do say so myself.
Oh, Sam makes pottery too. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
Thousands of people gathered last week in Richmond, Ind., for the centennial celebration of the Ford Model T, the machine that made the automobile a Main Street technology, with 15 million produced from 1908 to 1927. As a product, the Model T has long been seen as a classic example of no-frills, mass-produced standardization. It had no gas gauge. Even a windshield was an extra-cost option originally.
Yet the gathering in Indiana showed another facet of the Model T's history — how much owners tinkered with and modified the car. Among the 800 vintage automobiles brought by collectors were ones that had been converted to snowmobiles, racing coups and tow trucks. That was only a glimmer of the many innovative changes made by Model T owners, for uses Henry Ford never had in mind. They transformed the cars into tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel.
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Tyler over at Oddstrument Collection did a wonderful interview with sculptor Bruce Gray. I really love this piece of his, it's all jangly and clashy.
BG: I think that any sculpture that is designed to produce at least one musical tone can be considered a musical sculpture. Many of my sculptures could also have multiple classifications like a rolling ball musical kinetic sculpture, for example. I would include all my rolling ball machines as musical sculptures, even if they have just a few chimes on them. The rolling ball machines have lots of other great sounds too. Even just the sound of the steel ball running along the track is kind of mesmerizing. I love to include lots of musical stairways that resemble xylophones in most of them now.
Here's a nice litle roundup of stained glass works depicting subject unusual to the medium. Regarding the second photo above (not Link) -
this huge piece is called 'the electromagnetic spectrum in stained glass' and can be found at the national air and space museum. according to the museum's website it's 'a large stained-glass work showing the range of light that shines on Earth and how deeply it penetrates the atmosphere'.
Dave Clausen of NYCResistor built this very sweet cylinder display using 95 RGB LEDs & ATmega168 microcontroller -
The LEDs are individually addressable, and when you power it on, the software cycles through a series of animations, e.g. various moving rainbowy patterns, "rain", "fireworks", and so on. It doesn't serve much of a purpose but it is kind of cool to look at. The hardware and software are open source, so feel free to use/copy/extend whatever you find here (subject to the CC/GPL license terms).
Well done! Head over to Dave's site for thorough documentation and source - LED Cylinder
Mark has built a small tube amplifier project using the 6T9 vacuum tube. The tube amplifier project is constructed using a purchased PCB. The enclosure is a thin baking pan. A simple project that would make a good conversation piece on your desk.
Sorry, no benefits reported from using a non-stick surface - DIY 6T9 Tube / Valve Amplifier Project Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
It isn't that often that you can make a functioning scientific instrument from recycled junk lying around your house. The video shows you how to make a spectroscope out of a cardboard tube an old CD and some card-stock. Looks like a fun project to make with the kids. DIY Spectroscope
Save money with this DIY physics project, by making authentic scientific tools with recycled materials. A spectroscope is an instrument used to break light up into its constituent colors, like a prism does, showing the light spectrum.
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I had a scrap piece of train track that I used as an anvil, but wasn't as useful as this version. Mine was just a short piece of track, nothing fancy. This website shows you how to cut and shape the track into a classic anvil shape, making it much more useful.
Like to play video games? Too lazy to paddle around in your canoe? Well I have the perfect solution for you. This boat is powered by a small electric motor and the steering is via a Wii Nunchuck and an Arduino. Let's just hope the batteries don't die, then you might have to paddle!
In each volume of MAKE we have "major projects" these project pages are meaty step-by-step articles with start-to-finish photos, precise instructions and how-to learning that can range from making a VCR cat feeder to ariel kite photography. In MAKE volume 8 the projects are:
Project: Building an Ornithopter by William Gurstelle. Can humans fly by flapping? Build a small, rubber band-powered ornithopter whose motion is similar to a bird in flight. Page 90
Project: Gun-Operated Alarm Clock by Roger Ibars. Hack a retro gaming light gun with tilt switches to control a vintage digital clock radio. When the alarm wakes you up, grab the gun and kill it off! Page 100
Project: Coffee Roaster by Larry Cotton. To experience coffee nirvana, roast your own beans with this cheap, portable coffee roaster.Page 110
You can subscribe to MAKE to get in on this project action (use code CMAKE for $5 off) and you'll also get access to the MAKE digital edition, it's exactly like our print magazine, but online (no DRM), shareable, printable and can be accessed from just about any computer. Back issues of MAKE are also available in our Maker store.
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