Submarines are universally considered cool, but bring several challenges to the RC modeller that aren’t there with land and air builds. Water ingress can ruin your project, and there’s always the possibility of it sinking to the bottom, never to return. That didn’t phase [Brick Experiment Channel], however, and thus a Lego sub was born. […]
Archer fans already know, but for the rest of the world it bears saying – boats are fine, but fan boats are better. It’s much the same with land vehicles, too. [tinkeringtech] felt the same way, and built a Bluetooth-controlled fan car to scoot around the floor. (YouTube, embedded below.) Construction starts with a series […]
In many sports, it’s important for competitors to be light on their feet, and able to react quickly to external stimuli. It all helps with getting balls in goals, and many athletes undergo reaction drills as part of their training regime. To help with this, [mblaz] set out to build a set of reaction trainers. […]
Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago, yet there are some people who don’t think it happened. This story is not about them. It turns out there was another great conspiracy theory involving a well-known astronomer, unicorns, and humanoids with bat wings. This one came 134 years before the words “We chose to […]
“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the saying goes, and when it comes to coatings, it’s true that thinner is often better. The way to truly thin coatings, ones that are sometimes only a few atoms thick, is physical vapor deposition, or PVD, a technique where a substance is transformed into a […]
Resin casting videos have taken social media by storm of late. Everything from inlaid driftwood tables to fancy pens are getting the treatment. Pouring some nicely colored epoxy is straightforward enough, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. [Eric Strebel] has some serious skills in resin casting, and has lately been working on some […]
In our search for big-box convenience, we tend to forget that locksmiths once not only copied keys but also created complex locks and other intricate mechanisms from scratch. [my mechanics] hasn’t forgotten, and building a lock is his way of celebrating of the locksmith’s skill. Building a combination lock from a single stainless bolt is […]
The Internet is a wild and wooly place where people can spout off about anything with impunity. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about and throw around a few bits of the appropriate jargon, chances are good that somebody out there will believe whatever you’re selling. Case in point: those that purport […]
Electric motors are easy to make; remember those experiments with wire-wrapped nails? But what’s easy to make is often hard to engineer, and making a motor that’s small, light, and powerful can be difficult. [Carl Bugeja] however is not one to back down from a challenge, and his tiny “jigsaw” PCB motor is the latest […]
If you ask most people to explain the Fourier series they will tell you how you can decompose any particular wave into a sum of sine waves. We’ve used that explanation before ourselves, and it is not incorrect. In fact, it is how Fourier first worked out his famous series. However, it is only part […]