For the average rider, inner tubes have been one of the most enduring and unchanging parts of bicycle design over the decades. They’re made of rubber, they have a Schrader or Presta valve, and they generally do an okay job at cushioning the ride. However, if you’re an above-average rider, or just obsessive about your […]
Walking on grass, it’s easy, no matter the shoe. How about an inclined trail? Some hiking shoes or nice tennis shoes will do the trick. How about climbing a mountain? Now we are gonna need something special. [Magnus Midtbø] is a professional climber with an acute awareness of this fact and has used shoes of […]
A friend of mine and I both have a similar project in mind, the manufacture of custom footwear with our hackerspace’s shiny new multi-material 3D printer. It seems like a match made in heaven, a machine that can seamlessly integrate components made with widely differing materials into a complex three-dimensional structure. As is so often […]
Rubber! It starts out as a goopy material harvested from special trees, and is then processed into a resilient, flexible material used for innumerable important purposes. In the vast majority of applications, rubber is prized for its elasticity, which eventually goes away with repeated stress cycles, exposure to heat, and time. When a rubber part […]
If you’re living somewhere that gets icy in the wintertime, you know the sidewalk can be perilous. Slipping on ice hurts like hell if you’re lucky, and can cause serious injuries if you’re not. Naturally, if you’re trying to get down to the hackerspace when it’s cold out, you’ll look for solutions. [masterbuilder] wanted to […]