Category: copper

We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to […]
From the outside, iron meteorites tend to look like formless, rusted lumps of metal, which is why museums often polish and etch sections to show their interior structure. This reveals their Widmanstätten patterns, a latticework structure of parallel iron-nickel intermetallic crystals which forms over millions of years of very slow solidification. Inspired by this, [Electron […]
What if you electroplated a plastic 3D print, and then melted off the plastic to leave just the metal behind? [HEN3DRIK] has been experimenting with just such a process, with some impressive results. For this work, [HEN3DRIK] prints objects in a special PVB “casting filament” which has some useful properties. It can be smoothed with […]
Perfectly clear ice spheres are nifty but can be a bit tricky to make without an apparatus. [Seth Robinson] crafted a copper ice press to make his own. Copper is well-known for its thermal conductivity, making it a perfect material for building a press to melt ice into a given shape. Like many projects, a […]
Every action camera these days seems prone to overheating and sudden shutdowns after mere minutes of continuous operation. It can be a real pain, especially when the only heat problem a photographer might face back in the day was fogged film from storing a camera in a hot car. Then again, the things a digital […]
We love it when we find someone on the Internet who has the exact same problem we do and then solves it. [Hyperspace Pirate] starts a recent video by saying, “Oh no! I need to get rid of the algae in my pond, but I bought too much algaecide. If only there were a way […]
Many of us store a flashlight around the house for use in emergency situations. Usually, regular alkaline batteries are fine for this task, as they’ll last a good few years, and you remember to swap them out from time to time. Alternatively, you can make one that lasts virtually indefinitely in storage, and uses some […]
If an object is conductive or has been given a conductive coating, it can be given a metal skin via electroplating. Electroplating is a simple process that is perfectly accessible to anyone in possession of vinegar, salt, a power supply, and some metal such as copper or nickel. The process might be simple, but as […]