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A User’s Guide to Screws and Tap & Die
In these two clickclackclunk tutorials on Instructables, he offers an excellent beginner’s class on screws and tapping of screws. Knowing how to tap threads for fasteners gives you a new kind of superpower for your projects. It’s one of those skills that seems complicated and intimidating, until you do it. With a few specialty tools, some lubrication, and few important techniques, and you’re in like Flynn.
Making a Camera Tracking Shot Slider from a Measuring Tape
Via Maker Update comes this very clever project to 3D print a housing for a measuring tape and some ball bearing wheels so that you can use it as a non-motorized camera slider for creating linear tracking shots with your phonecam. You can even adjust the speed of the tracking by adjusting the pressure on the tape measure.
Which Rattle Can Paint is the Best?
In this Project Farm test (which took a year to complete), Todd tested rattle can paints that cost from $1 to $15. The paints were tested on a vehicle hood and on metal panels kept outside for a year and then compared for chip resistance, paint fade over a year, scratch resistance, and rust blocking. In the end, the winners were Rust-Oleum Pro ($6 at time of testing), Valspar ($10 at time of testing), and Seymour ($11 at time of testing). The big loser was the most expensive of the lot, Sherman-Williams ($15 at time of testing).
How to Create a Steam Box for Wood Bending
Xyla Foxlin recently made a cool bass guitar that used steam-bent wood in its construction. In this video, she shows how she created the steam box.
TOYS! DiResta Ice Pick
I’ve written about Jimmy DiResta’s ice pick before, but I can’t believe I’ve never recommended it as a tool. I use mine almost daily and am always surprised at the different uses I discover for it. There’s even an Instagram tag to document them. Sure, it’s not cheap, and yes, part of the allure is the hip maker cred, but buying one supports an indie tool maker and they’re beautifully made and hand-crafted by Jimmy and his crew. I’ve given several as Christmas presents and my recipients enjoy them as much as I do.
Maker’s Muse
A Roman “Swiss Army Knife,” some 1700 years old. Complete with three-pronged fork, spatula, pick, spike, and knife. Probably something of a luxury item, made of silver, and likely used by the wealthy Roman on the go.
Shop Talk
In response to a question in the last issue about ready-made racks for portable storage cases, specifically Stanley cases, I got a lot of responses sharing projects on how to build them. The person asking the question wanted to buy vs. build, saving him time for more pressing projects. I swear I saw a project years ago to quickly modify baker’s racks to use for this purpose. If anyone knows a link to such a project, please share.
In the meantime, for those looking to build a rack, here are a few projects that reader Craig shared:
Making a Small Parts Storage Rack
Making a Rack for Small Parts Storage with Stanley SortMasters
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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.
Manga Kamishibai tells and shows the fascinating history of Japanese paper theater, a lost storytelling form and the link between Edo-era Japanese ukiyo-e prints and modern day manga and television. I say “and shows” because this art form combined the spoken word with compelling visuals in uniquely Japanese storytelling performances and this book is rich with many wonderful reproductions of the hand-painted artwork.
Picture this: In devastated post-WWII Tokyo, a man stops his bicycle on a street corner. On the back of his bike is mounted a large, sixty-pound wooden box. The man flips a few panels around to reveal a stage-like picture frame. He noisily clacks together two wooden sticks, hiyogoshi, to call the neighborhood children. As they gather to see and hear the free show, the man sells them home-made penny candies, including a not-too-sweet taffy that’s pulled and stretched using a chopstick (like today’s movie business, the real money is in the profitable concessions!). The paying customers get a front row seat to the performance. The man slides a sequence of large, colorful panels in the frame “screen” as he tells adventure stories, quizzes the audience, and weaves tales of suspense, all with character voices and sound effects. As the story ends on a dramatic, to-be-continued cliff-hanger, the man packs up his two-wheel theater and pedals away … until next time. They are all but vanished now, but these performances date back to the 1930s when 2,500 kamishibaiya in Tokyo alone entertained 1 million kids a day.
Any fan of manga, anime, as well as comics in general will devour this book. The reproductions of the lurid images of action heroes, monsters, villains, and damsels in distress in the stories embody a potent mix of influences: Japanese ink brush work, movie posters, silent film and cinematic design, and plenty of Western references. The army of artists that painted these panels freely borrowed from many genres, from Betty Boop to folk tales. In turn, kamishibai set the stage for the manga and anime that took its place (many of the same artists moved along with them). As the advent of television made these live street performances obsolete (television was first called denki kamishibai, or “electric paper theater”), the artists lifted from popular TV shows for their dying art form. Holy copy-cat, Batman!
You’ll enjoy the witty captions, wide–ranging historical references and the clever writing style. This book also shows and tells how kamishibai was used to disseminate news, spread propaganda, illustrate war survival techniques, and fight prejudices. In a parallel to the congressional hearings and criticism by Wertham of the U.S. comic makers, kamishibai also was investigated and regulated. You’ll read (and see) other interesting facts, like the technological and historical reason why comics have always been an important media form in Japan. (Hint: what if your language doesn’t suit itself to using Gutenberg’s movable type?). Manga Kamishibai is a real treat for any fan of Japanese pop culture (candy not included). – Bob Knetzger
TWO SCI-FI TALES RUNNING SIMULTANEOUSLY LAUNCH A NEW 7-VOLUME SERIES
Nod Away by Joshua Cotter Fantagraphics 2016, 240 pages, 7.8 x 10.2 x 0.8 inches
Sometimes the most abstruse and esoteric dilemmas are best considered in the abstract, as if by not directly looking at things somehow makes them more clear. Zen masters speak in koans, Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms, and poets immerse themselves in metaphors, all of them trying to communicate things in a manner that steps outside of the constraints of language. So it is with Joshua W. Cotter’s new book from Fantagraphics Books, Nod Away.
Nod Away is the first of what Cotter promises to be a seven-volume series. Ostensibly this first volume is a sci-fi story that circles around issues such as the human desire for exploration and connection, the power structure inherent in gender politics, and the gray area created in the intersection between science and morality, but, as the book unfolds, the reader feels there is something more complicated occurring in the periphery. Cotter is exploring profound questions of consciousness itself by creating a story that asks them indirectly.
Densely detailed and tightly packed, Cotter’s pages pull and push the classic nine-panel grid layout, opening up or staying regimented as the emotional beat demands. His layouts control the reader’s experience explicitly and play with expectations in order to keep things just off balance enough to force engagement and demand active reading. Just when things start to coalesce, though, Cotter blows them apart.
Two stories run simultaneously in Nod Away. The first, tight and traditionally told in the sci-fi/horror genre, posits strong statements and allows for gradual character reveals. It is in the secondary tale, though, one of a damaged man traversing a desolate environment, that Cotter enlarges his art and permeates it with surrealistic and totemic imagery that presses the reader to observe and to pause and to ponder.
Nod Away stands at the verge of a much longer journey, reassuringly beckoning the reader to follow and promising something incredible to be discovered at its end. – Daniel Elkin
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.
