Make: Talk 004 - Steve Lodefink, Broad-Spectrum Hobbyist

Here's the fourth episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine.

Our maker this week is Steve Lodefink. An inveterate tinkerer and "broad-spectrum hobbyist," Steve just can't say no to a cool project. At 3, he was already reverse-engineering the peanut butter and jelly sandwich: "I figured out where all of the parts were, found a good tool, and built one. I've been doing it ever since." He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons, two cats, five tarantulas, and 24 African cichlids, and thinks that one of life's great pleasures is a really sharp aged cheddar cheese. "I'm a simple man," he says. He looks at life's debris at finkbuilt.com.

I talked to Steve about his Easy Sunburst Guitar, Atomic Ball Clock, Soda Bottle Rocket, and more.

And, at the beginning of the episode, Maker Shed Marc de Vinck describes our new Tiny Wanderer Robot Kit, an autonomous robot with a $2 microcontroller brain.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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For the record, the so-called “atomic ball clock” by Mr. Lodefink is nothing more than a copy of George Nelson’s iconic “Ball clock” designed in 1948 with Isamu Nogichi, Buckminster Fuller and Irving Harper.
- steve lodefink
  
  Right you are!
  
  Here is a “quote” from George Nelson about that 1948 design session:
  
  “I remember that at some point Steve Lodefink came over, and he had this weakness for absynth you see, and we had all been hitting it pretty hard all night, anyway Steve grabbed the pencil from Isamu, and slurring something about radiation from the Atomic tests mutating everything into huge manifestations of what they had been or some such nonsense, I don’t know, nobody really remembers much about that night. When I brought the drawings to Herman Miller the next day they immediately pointed to the huge, 27 inch welded-steel version of Noguchi’s idea….”
  
  Source: http://www.finkbuilt.com/blog/learn-to-weld/
- robuluz
  
  For the record, Steve Lodefink just totally pwned your ass.