Musical chairs anyone? eh? … Verizon's How 2.0 brings another interesting DIY music project to the table, fitting a set of organ pipes and bellows to a seat. Prolonged operation of the instrument would likely provide a bit of a workout. Skip ahead to ~2m50s to hear it sound-off. Build details available here - Pipe Organ Chair

[via Create Digital Music]

Tear up the quote from the professional upholsterer amounting to close to $1,500. You can sew, use a staple gun and a hammer - how hard can it be.

Read more about how to Reupholster your old furniture

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HOW TO - Reupholster a chair with denim

Instuctables user wholman (out of Arcosanti, AZ) whipped up a how-to for this chair made from an old metal sign. Looks like a lot of his projects are made from signs featuring the name of a relative of his!

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Tennis ball chair

The "Sound of Light " by Matthew Fernandez is a case made for a flourescent tube light that was made by recording and graphic 1 second of the "hum" sound produced by the light. The pattern was made by laser cutting clear acrylic and 50 layers of the substance were uses where each layer corresponds to 20ms of the recording. Another interesting physical visualization of sound by this talented artist / product designer.

The Work of Matthew Plummer Fenandez, via Information Aesthetics

Ted crafted a fitting set of stairs for his skateboard deck building school -

This is a set of steps I made for our skateboard school. The aluminium beam is a solid billet of aluminium and the decks were custom made with concave only on one edge. You should see the look on our students faces when they make the treck to the basement.

4 of my favorite projects:

Bike seat / frame to barstool. Kind of obvious when you see it, huh?

I'm not sure why, but I find the giant-hand-holding-hose incredibly appropriate.

PVC piping becomes an easy shelf.

Kitchen retrofitted with corrugated plastic / metal cabinet covers. Stove is on rollers and powered by propane.

Low tech, high ingenuity!

Designer John Nouanesing came up with this amazing table, he says it's going into production later this year. via Inspire Underground

Michelle @ CRAFT writes:

Ikea Hacker points out lamps that Jim makes from things he finds at Ikea like this Ordning colander. I can't say I would ever use a colander as a lampshade, but it does look pretty cool.

Unlike a lot of other chair mods I've seen, these actually look cozy. This photo was taken at the 2007 California State Fair. (Via Cute Overload) And if white fluffy animals aren't to your taste, here are a couple of other takes on the genre from Moss, designed by the Campana brothers.

Check out this LEGO-looking table that looks like it may fall down, aptly named UnsTable. The blocky rotating cube legs conceal a metal rod, so it really won't, and it could make for a nice remake. Via Core77.

On EMS Labs, Lenore has a clear, well-documented and photographed piece on keeping your butt close to those beloved bluejeans long after the knees and crotch have worm out by turning them into seat cushions.

Chair Reupholstery with Used Denim

Here's another one for the wacky chair file.

Tennis Ball Chair

More:

• Pool noodle chair
• Folding chair makeover
• Paperback chair

This project shows you how to build a compact DIY router table using a large piece of MDF at the top. Pretty nice construction set at the link below on building this structure to enable lots of potential future makes.

DIY Router Table

ToolCrib has a roundup of free sawhorse plans, and if you can't find what you're looking for in a sawhorse there, I don't know where you will. Unless, of course, you've designed your own. Please share your plans with us in the comments! Via Core77. Image from Woodworkingtips.com.

Neale writes in:

Here's a quick and easy DIY project to make a shelf out of a ski. It's a decent use for something people might have lying around, or can at least find pretty easily at yard sales (well, easy up here in the north).

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Snowboard bench

In a continuing effort to create unique and unusual robots I just completed RoboStool - a robotic foot stool. Where would such an idea as a robot foot stool come from? I'm not really sure but one day while waiting for my wife to finish shopping in a Bed Bath and Beyond (and totally bored of course) I spied the ultimate in tacky furniture - a cubed shaped foot stool covered in the finest of brown vinyl. At that moment it occurred to me that this foot stool was just begging to be automated. And thus began the RoboStool project.

Read more about the RoboStool

Milk crates are very versitile, and for many, a college staple. Often it doesn't take more than a few bungee cords or a length of rope to turn a few into whatever storage or furniture solution you need. Here's a chandelier made from several. The linked article also has several other milk crate furniture mods. Via Core77.

Here at MAKE, we believe in the perpetuation of milk crate ingenuity. Here are a few more:

I always wondered what went into those high-end speaker cabinets, and instructables user billbob has resolved my curiosity. He covers electrical construction, but mainly focuses on making really stellar speaker boxes, and has tons of pictures and tips. I know just as well as anybody around here that electronics projects aren't always that great looking, but here's an anomaly.

From the MAKE Flickr pool: user Queen Esoterica hacked her Ikea kitchen butcher block counter to include a bowl. She writes:

You shove cut stuff into the bowl (I tend to cut right to left). then you can take the bowl to wherever you're cooking and then brush the trash into the (soon to be plastic-lined) drawer, for easy transport to the trash. I got two bowls of equal diameter, one deeper and one shallower. To use the deep one, you have to remove te drawer. But I didn't even forsee how great this would be for baking! It was great!

This would be a dream for me. I might be inclined to use the bowl for scraps, too, depending on what kind of cookery's going on.

Here's a simple trick for turning a freebie hex kit into a hex bit for a power drill. Of course, as many people point out in the item's comments, you can get cheap hex bit sets in hardware and home stores.

Hack the hex [via Lifehacker]

Learn how to make a Seat made from bike parts and crutches

This looks like a simple enough remake, spotted in the MAKE Flickr Pool: a bench made from two snowboards. Might be great for your out-of-commission boards or for ones so artsy you can't bear to take them out on the snow.

More:

• Building your own Snowboard
  
• Skateboard art
  
• Laser-etched skateboards
  

This project turns a vintage "Planet Lamp" into a parabolic microphone for recording and uses a CMoy, low power amplifier circuit for the microphone. The whole project runs runs from a 9 volt battery. Check out the link for circuit diagrams and instructions for this project.

The Lamp - Parabolic Microphone

Dave Rocamora turned his old Ikea night table into a charging station for his gadgets, and made it an elegant lamp at the same time. He made a nice instructable about it, too, so with not much more than a router and utility knife, you can achieve the same look.

Here's a chair made out of furniture-grade birch plywood, pine dowels, cast aluminum, and pool noodles for the cushions.

Four Square Chair

Rishi Oswal (of in and around San Diego, CA) lives in his car. Now, what separates him from that guy in his van down by the river is this totally incredible custom bed platform he made to go inside his Honda Element. He documented its creation insanely well on his blog, with every little detail explained. Even if you don't live in your car, this would make for a roadtripper's dream! (Thanks, Lisa!)

The "Reflect" table is an LED board embedded inside a table that monitors the sound levels of people's conversations with an array of microphones around the exterior. The multi-color LEDs show the sound levels of the chatter of those speaking so that they can get a visual picture of who is dominating the conversation. The translucent paneling in front of the lights is meant to move the feedback system into the background so that people will not concentrate on the lights. Pretty nice, but I think that might ruin the conversation itself.

REFLECT: Noise Sensitive Table, [via]

We found these gorgeous lamps, made from clear-cased micro-cassettes, on Boing Boing Gadgets. This seems like a cool, easy project that you could also do with full-sized clear cassettes (you'd just want to use fewer of them so your lamp wouldn't be huge). Check out the cool patterns the light makes.

Transparent House
Note: This rather annoying Flash-based site does not contain any how-to instructions on these lamps, only photos (found in the Portfolio->Industrial Design section).

Today, Evil Mad Scientist Labs releases the circuit diagram for the LED Dining Table project that they, and we, first blogged about in 2006. Windell writes:

We're releasing this as a free (and fully unsupported) project design, so... "Have fun, kids!"

Interactive LED Dining Table Circuit

Related:

• LED Dining table