Continuing the restoration of the #1 Lancashire boiler at the Claymills Pumping Station in the UK, the volunteers are putting on the final touches after previously passing the boiler inspection. Although it may seem that things are basically ready to start laying down a fire after the boiler is proven to hold 120 PSI with […]
Anyone who saw Back to the Future II was disappointed when 2015 rolled around with nary a hoverboard in sight. There have been various attempts to fake it, but none of them quite have the feel of floating about wherever you’d like to go that the movie conveys. The little-known YouTuber [Colin Furze] has a […]
That fireball was LZ37. Nobody wanted to see repeats post-war.Image: “The great exploit of lieutenant Warnefort 1916 England” by Gordon Crosby, public domain. After all the crashing and burning of Imperial Germany’s Zeppelins in the later part of WWI – once the Brits managed to build interceptors that could hit their lofty altitude, and figured […]
A long winter has a way of making a lot of us northerners a little bit squirrly. In [Build N Pulsejets]’s case, squirly enough to mount a home-made propane-powered pulse-jet to a kids’ kick scooter and take to the frozen lake for a rip. Okay, well, it started as a kid’s scooter, but after trying […]
You’ve got to be ambitious to target a legend. If there’s one thing the folks at Hermeus Aerospace are, though, it’s ambitious: not only do they plan on their Quarterhorse unmanned arial vehicle (UAV) to outfly the SR-71 blackbird, they’re hoping to do it in record time. They took one big step closer to that […]
When thinking of humanity’s ability to harness wind energy, many people will conjure images of windmills from places like The Netherlands or Persia. But people have been using wind energy for far longer than that in the form of sailing ships. Using the wind for transportation goes back another four thousand years or so, but […]
Light aircraft often use a heading indicator as a way to know where they’re going. Retired instrumentation engineer [Don Welch] recreated a heading indicator of his own, using cheap off-the-shelf hardware to get the job done. The heart of the build is a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. It’s paired with a BNO085 inertial measurement unit (IMU), […]
Electric vehicles are everywhere these days, and with them comes along a whole slew of charging infrastructure. The fastest of these are high-power machines that can deliver enough energy to charge a car in well under an hour, but there are plenty of slower chargers available that take much longer. These don’t tend to require […]
Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s […]
One of the ongoing rumors and scandals in professional cycle sport concerns “motor doping” — the practice of concealing an electric motor in a bicycle to provide the rider with an unfair advantage. It’s investigated in a video from [Global Cycling Network], in which they talk about the background and then prove its possible by […]