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A Master Class in Prototype Making
In response to John Baglio’s search for a series of prototyping videos he’d run across, Talon Chandler immediately responded with:
“He’s probably talking aboutDan Gelbart. Dan is a local legend among engineers in Vancouver, BC. He founded Creo, a printing technology company that sold to Kodak circa 2005, and several other companies including Kardium, a growing healthcare company. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Dan once (I interned at Kardium close to 10 years ago), although I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting his extraordinary shop.”
Others also messaged me and told stories about the impact of Dan’s videos on them. They are amazing. I haven’t found a treasure trove like this since discovering TubalCain/MrPete222 some 15 years ago. Anyone interested in precision machining, prototyping, water jet cutting, and a wealth of general machine shop wisdom should check out this channel.
Expanding the Usefulness of 1-2-3 Blocks with a Hardware Kit
I’ve long been a fan of 1-2-3 blocks and always have them handy when doing a host of different projects. They’re great for quick measuring, aligning, holding parts together for gluing/ fastening, as shop weights, and countless other applications. One of the features that few people outside of machining use are the holes drilled into the blocks. These are not just there to keep the overall weight down. They are threaded and non-threaded holes designed for attaching the blocks in various configurations (such as for making right-angle or T-shaped jigs).
In this Stumpy Nubs video, James introduces a clever little hardware kit for easily attaching blocks – and attaching them with nothing proud of the surfaces. As he points out, you can source these screws and through-hole fasteners yourself, but why not support the guy who came up with the idea for this kit? That guy, Mike Taylor, sells a kit of 6 hex-head screws, sized for 1″, 2″, and 3″ attachment, 4 threaded through-hole dowels, a hex key, and a slotted driver head – all housed in a handy little plastic box. I immediately bought a kit (only $10) and I love it. Mike also makes really high-quality blocks at an affordable price ($20/pair). I snagged a pair of those, too. It always feels good to support a maker small business.
Using Finger Pressure to Match Hex Head to Wrench
On the Twitter account of software engineer Roach, he posted this clever way of matching a hex head to a hex wrench. Pressing your finger into the head will leave a dimple that you can use to size the appropriate wrench.
A Prompt Book for Better AI Art Generation
If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, you’ve likely seen some of your acquaintances go down the rabbit hole of artificial intelligence image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Google’s Imagen. These programs take descriptions that you feed them and return AI- generated art interpretations of that input. It’s very addictive and fun and has huge disruptive potential. My wife Angela and I were joking a few weeks ago that in the future, art will be nothing more than the ability to input the most fulsome description of what you want. And then, just a few days later, Recomendo shared a link to The Prompt Book, a free PDF of instructions, examples, and tips for refining your input commands. It’s directed at the DALL-E program, but its ideas can be applied to any of these art generators. In the future, art will be incantation.
Making a Shop Paper Roll Dispenser
Poking around on the ‘Tubes, I came across a series of DIY videos, called Try, that Kevin Kelly did on Cool Tools in 2020-21. How did I miss these? Here’s one on building a kraft paper roll cutter for your shop and a really charming one about the sign that he made for the Kelly compound in Pacifica, CA.I hope he gets inspired to do more of these.
Maker Slang
Jargon, slang, and tech terms from the many realms of making.
FEP – (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene) A tough, no-stick plastic material commonly found in the bottoms of resin vat 3D printers. Its translucence allows the light source beneath it to shine through the vat, curing the resin onto the build plate.
Holidays – A term used by professional painters and gilders/gold leafers to refer to gaps in coverage. It derives from the joke that a painter must have taken some time off, a little holiday, by not covering an area they should have. [Hat tip to gilder Michael Kramer]
Minimal viable product – A phrase used by Italian maker and product developer, Giaco Whatever. In creating a product, you want to pare your idea down to its minimum possible components. See also: KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
Real job – A project that’s a series of tasks and challenges that imply significant time and effort – as opposed to a task which can be quickly accomplished. “That’s a real job. I need to set aside an afternoon for that.”
Resilient idiot – A self-deprecating admission that sometimes knowledge and skills seemingly won’t stick, not matter how hard you try and learn them. Coined by Donald Bell. Not to be confused with Andy Birkey’s similar: actual moron.
“This is a very common tool for locksmiths when dealing with vehicle lockouts. The inflatable pry bar can generally create enough space for the locksmith to drop a loop down to grab the lock pin from the interior of the door frame and gain entry without having to damage or possibly ruin the actual lockset on the car door. But don’t underestimate their power. I used one on an old car when I locked my keys in and it bent the door to the point that it never fully aligned to the door frame gasket again.”
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Cool tools really work.
A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.
The Science Book is DK publishing’s “greatest hits” of science. Laid out chronologically and full of diagrams and photos, it gives you a coffee table book experience but in a manageable way. No book clocking in at 350-ish pages could be totally comprehensive, yet it includes most of the major scientific milestones from 600 BCE to today without being dry or overwhelming.
I found that I was able to gain a better understanding of principles that I only marginally understood, like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which is clearly laid out in layman’s terms and with genuinely helpful visuals. Genetics is a particularly complicated topic that has always fascinated me, so I was especially drawn to the chapters that tackled it and found a diagram using bees to explain recessive traits to be one of my favorite features. The individual chapters are broken up into sections and use sidebars and trivia to keep things interesting, so no matter what topic you land on the information is always accessible. I haven’t read it cover to cover, but rather peruse whatever topic catches my eye and always find something I didn’t known before. Textbooks devoted to science have an unfortunate tendency to be dry and technical, so I am especially excited to share The Science Book with my son as he gets older, with the hope that it may help him develop a real interest in science and an appreciation of its value. – Amber Troska
SENSORS – THE FINAL VOLUME IN AN IMPRESSIVE SERIES OF ELECTRONICS GUIDES FOR 21ST-CENTURY MAKERS
Encyclopedia of Electronic Components Volume 3: Sensors by Charles Platt and Fredrik Jansson Maker Media 2016, 256 pages, 7.9 x 9.6 x 0.4 inches (softcover)
With this somewhat slim but jam-packed volume, Make: contributing editor and electronics columnist, Charles Platt (here joined by Fredrik Jansson), completes his detailed explorations of the modern, common electronics components most useful to today’s electronics hobbyists and other DIYers.
The first volume, which Wink reviewed earlier, covered batteries, power supplies, motors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, switches, encoders, relays, diodes, transistors, and more. Volume 2covered LEDs, LCDs, audio, amplification, digital logic, and related components. This third and final volume examines common (and a few not so common) sensors for detecting location, presence, proximity, orientation, oscillation, force, load, human input, liquid and gas properties, light, heat, sound, and electricity.
Like all of the volumes in the series, each component section in Sensors is divided into what it does, how it works, variants and values of the component, how to use it, and what can go wrong with it. Each entry is generously illustrated with clear color photos, charts and graphs, and cut-away diagrams of the components (all done by Platt). Thoughtfully, the component images are all photographed on a graph paper background, so you can get some idea of their actual size.
One of the things that I think has made the Make: Electronicsseries such a great success is that Charles Platt is a smart, endlessly curious, and details-oriented electronics enthusiast who knows what questions fellow enthusiasts might have about how a component functions and what it’s useful for. He is not an engineer, he is a professional amateur and I often find that such amateurs write better tech books than professionals. In Volume 3, he and Jansson do another admirable job of writing in a style that is non-intimidating to the beginner, but no less rigorous to the more seasoned circuit designer/builder.
These three volumes, taken together, provide you with the reference material you need for spec’ing components for most common hobby-level electronics projects. Or, if you wanted to, you could significantly increase your understanding of basic electrical engineering by working your way through them, one component at a time. And given how lovely the books are, how well photographed and illustrated, how readable, doing so would not be a hardship.
Over the course of the past seven years, Charles and Maker Media have released five books in the Make: Electronics series and two component packs. I’m biased (I helped instigate this series as an editor at Make:), but I think this collection is one of the most significant things Make: has done. We set out to create the Getting Started in Electronics [http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282] for the early 21st century. The success of the series speaks for itself. I’m now just waiting for a new generation of high-tech innovators to tell us enthusiastically how they cut their teeth on the Make: Electronics series. I like to imagine that they’re teething on the resistors, capacitors, and ICs as we speak. – Gareth Branwyn
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair.Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
