If you need a reflow oven, you can very easily head down to Walmart or Target and pick up a toaster oven for fifteen bucks or so. Even without any control electronics, a bone-stock toaster oven works well enough for reflow soldering, but if you want to do it right you’ll also want to add […]
When planning out a workspace at home, the job, or at a makerspace, we all tend to focus on the fun parts. Where the equipment will go, how you’ll power it, what kind of lights you’ll get, etc, etc. It’s easy to devote all your attention to these high-level concepts, which often means the little […]
Right now you can get a custom circuit board delivered to your door in about a week for just a few dollars. There’s little reason to make your own circuit boards at home anymore, but when you need a board now, you want to have that capability. [tuval] designed a complete PCB etching station that […]
If you’re doing a lot of metal working, a chop saw is a great tool to have. It’s an easy and quick way to do a lot of neat, clean accurate cuts. [Making Stuff] wanted to do just that, but didn’t have a chop saw lying around. Instead, an old Stihl chainsaw was placed on […]
We’ll admit it, in an era when you can get a four channel digital storage oscilloscope with protocol decoding for a few hundred bucks, it can be hard not to see the appeal of analog CRT scopes from decades past. Sure they’re heavy, harder to use, and less capable, but they just look so cool. […]
Now, digital calipers with wired interfaces to capture the current reading are nothing new. But the good ones are expensive, and really, where’s the fun in plugging a $75 cable into a computer? So when [Max Holliday] was asked to trick out some calipers for automating data capture, he had to get creative. [Max] found […]
In years gone by, trying out a new circuit probably would have meant heating up a soldering iron. Solderless breadboards have made that even easier and computer simulation is easier still, but there’s something not quite as satisfying about building a circuit virtually. [Thedeuluiz] has a way to get some of the best of both […]
In every workshop ever, there’s a power tool that goes unnoticed. It’s the bench grinder. It’s useful when you need it, and completely invisible when you don’t. We take the bench grinder for granted, in part because we keep it over there with that box of oily rags, and partly because it’s so unassuming. But […]