Category: Tool Hacks

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 […]
Own a Bus Pirate 5? Now, it can do power glitching, thanks to [Matt Brugman’s] demo and contributions to the stock code. This is also a great demo of Bus Pirate’s capabilities and program-ability! All you need is the Bus Pirate and a generic Arduino – load a glitch-vulnerable code example into the Arduino, get […]
Adding LEDs to a project used to be enough to make it cool. But these days, you need arrays of addressable multi-color LEDs, and that typically means WS2812B or something similar. The problem is that while it was pretty easy to test garden-variety LEDs, these devices can be a bit harder to troubleshoot. [Gokux] has […]
There are many ways to hack the world. Graduate students at Parsons The New School for Design developed a guide for hacking the biggest piece of technology humans have developed – the city. One of the things we love here at Hackaday is how hacking gives us a tool to make the world a better […]
If somebody asked you to visualize a CNC router, you’d probably think of some type of overhead gantry that moves a cutting tool over a stationary workpiece. It’s a straightforward enough design, but it’s not without some shortcomings. For one thing, the scale of such a machine can quickly become an issue if you want […]
“World’s best” is a mighty ambitious claim, regardless of what you’ve built. But from the look of [Marius Hornberger]’s tricked-out miter fence, it seems like a pretty reasonable claim. For those who have experienced the torture of using the standard miter fence that comes with machine tools like a table saw, band saw, or belt […]
Vacuum forming is perhaps one of the less popular tools in the modern maker arsenal, something which surprises us a bit because it offers many possibilities. We’ve created our own vacuum forms on 3D printed moulds for ages, so it’s interesting to see [Pisces Printing ] following the same path. But what you might not […]
Last year, we saw [How To Make Everything’s] take on [DaVinci’s] machine for cutting threads. However, they stopped short of the goal, which was making accurate metal screw threads. After much experimentation, they have a working solution. In fact, they tried several different methods, each with varying degrees of success. Some of the more unusual […]
It’s common problem when you’re building anything with screws: this one is too long, this one is too short. While she can’t teach you how to fix the latter, [Quinn Dunki] has made herself an absolutely deluxe screw shortening jig. And while that’s cool and all, the real value here is the journey; watching over […]
Virtual Reality in woodworking sounds like a recipe for disaster—or at least a few missing fingers. But [The Swedish Maker] decided to put this concept to the test, diving into a full woodworking project while wearing a Meta Quest 3. You can check out the full experiment here, but let’s break down the highs, lows, […]