The Altoids tin is something of a gold standard for teeny-weeny casemodders, artists, campers and other ingenious maker-types. Read the rest

Enjoy this satisfying video of an engraving expert fashioning a hand-engraved hammer, without a forge. Read the rest

John Frost writes, "Travis, a railroad engineer, recreated iconic buildings from Disneyland's Fantasyland in his spare time. The result is an incredibly detailed and faithful recreation of facades to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Scary Adventures and more." Read the rest

Redditor Ch8s3 created this custom game controller by creating a new case, seating the mainboard in it and soldering new LEDs on, then swapping out the buttons for dremeled-out shell-cases from a Luger 9MM, a Remington 20, and a 12 gauge Hornady 50 caliber. It's beautiful work. Read the rest

BaremetalHW's narrated timelapse of his restoration of a completely trashed Hot Wheels 1971 "Bye-Focal" car is fantastically satisfying: watching him bang out the dings, zinc coat, polish, paint, decorate and re-fit this tiny car to near-perfection is a glorious defiance of entropy. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Fill a plastic soda bottle with ground meat, attach a plastic plumbing elbow, and start squeezing your way to kebab heaven.

this life hack rules pic.twitter.com/OE0NDfpoMB

— an actual dog🌹 (@devtesla) September 16, 2018

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A lot of people can't stand the dedicated Bixby button on Samsung phones because it is easy to accidentally press. And on the Galaxy Note 9, you can't turn off Bixby. So Jerry from Jerry Rig Everything offers a warranty voiding solution -- remove the button and fill the cavity with solid 14k gold, kind of like the way a dentist would fill a tooth cavity with gold. My cheapskate solution: use some black Sugru. Read the rest

gocivici made this amazing mechanical clock with a 3D printer and generously shared the plans on Instructables.

[via Evil Mad Scientist] Read the rest

Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer used a 1980s knitting machine to create a gorgeous equatorial star map in the form of a huge tapestry.

From Space.com:

The piece features all 88 constellations as seen from Earth, as well as the equatorial line with the zodiac constellations running along it, stars scaled according to their real-life brightness, the Milky Way galaxy, the sun, Earth's moon and all of the planets within our solar system. Spencer made sure to put the planets, sun and moon in specific, strategic positions so that the heavenly bodies indicate a specific date in time.

After 15kg of wool and over 💯 hrs of knitting, I’m finally ready to fly to the UK. Now I just need to pack the entire universe into my suitcase! I’ll see you all soon 🤗 pic.twitter.com/orBWAmi3bW

— Heart of Pluto (@HeartOfPluto_) August 26, 2018

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A good shop tip is a meme in the original sense of the word (an idea so useful that it quickly spreads from one nervous system to another). My friend Gareth Branwyn has been collecting shop tips for many years, and he has assembled them into a new book called Tips and Tales From the Workshop, which is filled with hundreds of truly useful tips organized by topic. You'll learn about smart ways to keep track of small parts, plan projects, glue things, mark things, cut things, drill things, and paint things. The tips on 3D printing have greatly reduced my frustration level. Even if you don't have a workshop many of the tips here can save you time.

Here are a few sample pages:

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"You're most likely not going to lose a finger making soap," says John Hanson of Longfellow Soap in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That's reassuring! In this video, John shows you how to make bar soap at home. He says it takes about two hours to make a batch. The ingredients include olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, lye (drain opener), and some kind of scented oil, like lemongrass. I had no idea that you needed to cure soap for about 3 weeks after you pour it into the mold. The process looks pretty easy and a lot of fun. I want to give this a try. Read the rest

In this video my friend and former Make colleague, Becky Stern, shows how she organized her workspace. She says she threw away a bunch of unwanted stuff but also found interesting tools and components that she forgot she had. Read the rest

Arduino is an electronics prototyping platform that makes it easy to build interactive projects without being an electrical engineer. Here's a $16 kit that has an Arduino Uno clone, a solderless breadboard, a charging cable, and lots of components to get you started.

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Andy of How To Make Everything decided to make his own bug spray by growing certain plants and extracting their essential oils. He put the oils into alcohol that he distilled from some foul-smelling crabgrass beer he'd made previously. Then he went to a wildlife preserve with some friends to test out the spray. He deemed the spray to be "moderately effective," but said he is going to order a batch of research mosquitoes and perform a more scientifically rigorous test in a couple of weeks. Read the rest

As a teenager in the 1970s, hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash hacked together his own DJ mixer in his bedroom. At the time, he was attending a vocational high school in the Bronx where he had developed some electronics repair chops. Flash needed his Sony microphone mixer to have a cueing feature enabling him to preview his mix through headphones before sending the audio to the speakers for everyone to hear. So he hit Radio Shack for the parts to make his own musical tool, and history.

For more on the development of DJ mixers, see this classic Cuepoint feature.

(via Kottke)

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It's hard to make hardware mods to an iPhone, because there's not a lot of room to add anything, and it doesn't have user friendly parts or interfaces. But Scotty Allen, a hardware hacker who lives part-time in Shenzhen, met up with a guy who designed a little circuit board that gives older iPhones the capability to charge wirelessly.

You guys have been asking me for a long while now - Is it possible to add wireless charging to an older iPhone? Could you add wireless charging to an iPhone 7 or even a 6s? But it sounded pretty hard, so I held off. But I recently got a twitter DM from a Chinese guy named Yeke, who said he'd designed a circuit board (flex PCB) to do just this. So of course I had to go meet him, and try it for myself, which of course started me on an unexpected journey through the cell phone world of Huaqiangbei.

LEDs are diodes (that's what the D stands for) and diodes are sensitive to voltage drops: when you blow on an LED, you make it ever so slightly cooler, and that causes an infinitesimal, but detectable voltage drop. Read the rest