Make: Online: Made On Earth Archives

Archive: Made On Earth

< Previous | Made On Earth Home | Next >

November 3, 2009

Dragon skeleton sculpture made from real bones

There are lots of custom knife-makers out there, and plenty that specialize in exotic or fantasy knives, but there is only one I know of who has gone so far as to invent a fictional world, complete with geography, mythology, and history, as a context for his work.

Virgil England installed and photographed this life-size dragon skeleton in Chugach National Forest in Alaska in 1990. In his own words:

The part of the Dragon that is exposed is about 18 feet long. The wing is 15 feet high. The skeleton is carved whale bone and forged mild steel with reindeer rawhide stretched and stitched over the bones. I did it to display a 59 1/2 inch two handed sword called "The Veil of Tears". After the ten hour photo session It went to a three day showing in San Francisco then to the buyers.

Virgil's handmade knives are highly sought after among collectors, and you can view more of his edged work at his personal website. The photos of his "Chugach Draegon" that appear with this post are being published online here for the first time. Click on each to see it at full resolution. [Thanks, Virgil!]

November 1, 2009

Homemade medium format camera

Peter Johansson is building a professional-grade medium-format camera. Like, from scratch. He's about 80% done and has done a wonderful job documenting the build. [Thanks, Billy!]

Pac-Man pumpkins

Reader Dave Adams submitted this cool Pac Man pumpkin display, complete with ghosts, dots, and fruit. Shown immediately above under regular and UV light. [Thanks, David!]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

There's still three days left to enter the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Deadline is November 3rd. Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 29, 2009

Minimalist nativity set

Halloween is so two days from now. Which might as well be last week on the internet. I'm moving on to Xmas. From Berlin artist Oliver Fabel. [via Neatorama]

October 27, 2009

Humongous treehouse

That's no treehouse, that's a foresthouse!

The Worlds Greatest TreeHouse

The gravity-powered xylophones of Charles and Ray Eames

eames musical tower ball falling (Custom).jpg

eames musical tower ball loading (Custom).jpg

eames musical tower piston loading (Custom).jpg

eames musical tower ball return (Custom).jpg

These "musical towers" are featured in the short film 901: After 45 Years of Working by Eames Demetrios. 901 documents the dismantling of the office of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1988 following Ray's death. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.

The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.

The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15' tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.

There does not seem to be any video of the towers in operation available online, but 901: After 45 Years of Working is available on the first disc of The Films of Charles and Ray Eames, which also includes final and rough draft versions of the classic Powers of Ten. Highly recommended.

World's smallest model train set? - seems likely!

Wow! David K. Smith has made what seems a shoo-in for the title of World's smallest model train -

This is a Z scale model of an N scale train layout--a model of a model. And it works. I built it to sit in the window of a Z scale hobby shop on my "real" train layout, the James River Branch.

- and this isn't even his first micro layout, check out one of the larger yet still impressively eentsy predecessors. [via Neatorama]

"SuperFoam" block collapses into chair under weight

I got jealous of Matt's recent "SuperFoam" chair post and had to find one of my own. This design is from a Taiwanese student named Yu-Wing Wu. The voids are non-random, being carefully designed to collapse into the shape of an armchair when you sit on the thing, which in its resting state looks more like a giant block of tofu than a chair. No word on how it was manufactured. [via Neatorama]

October 26, 2009

Graffiti marker disguised as cigarette

I recently ordered some refillable paint pens from Art Primo, and this was in the box as a freebie. It's the exact size, shape, and color as a cigarette, and among a dozen real cigarettes in a pack it'd likely pass any search completely unnoticed. It took me a minute to figure out its nefarious purpose: If you get caught in the vicinity of a fresh tag, after all, it's best not to be found with a marker on your person. They're manufactured by Germany's On The Run, but you won't find them on their website. The one I got was gold; the silver ones below were photographed by Flickr user $30,000.

October 25, 2009

Giant cobweb made of coffee stirrers

Jonathan Brilliant Coffee Stirrer Cobweb Installation.JPG

Jonathan Brilliant Coffee Stirrer Cobweb Installation Close Up.JPG

I'm going to invent a time machine so I can go back and persuade my parents to name me Jonathan Brilliant, which for now am this guy what made this impressive installation simply called "The Berlin Piece." [via Dude Craft]

October 23, 2009

Loss-proof remote control

My cell phone has a little eye molded into the case for attaching a lanyard strap. I want my A/V remotes to have the same thing so that if I should decide that I want to tie one of them to, say, the leg of my coffee table, I won't be driven to the same lengths as this guy.

October 22, 2009

Eternal flame replaced by LEDs

Must. Resist. Yakov Smirnoff. Joke. This is a war memorial, after all, and to a particularly nasty bit of a particularly nasty war, at that. Still, in the same way that Italians can laugh about the fact that, yes, it can be a bit of a pain to renew your driver's license in Italy, or that Estadounidenses can admit that, yes, we have been known to occasionally over-commercialize certain things, even patriotic Russians will see that there is something of the stereotypically Russian in this story.

This memorial was erected in Ukraine shortly after WWII to commemorate the legions of fallen dead. For 50 years its eternal flame burned natural gas piped in under the Soviet administration. Then...well, things fall apart, as everyone knows. With the breakup of the USSR, the flow of free natural gas into Ukraine stopped and it became too expensive to keep the torch lit. I'm sure it was a sad day that finally saw the flame go out.

Apparently it sat unlit for several years until this compromise solution was achieved: The flame would be converted into a cell-phone tower, the antennae concealed by a round facade bearing a pixelated flickering LED-flame image funded by the cell-phone company. One of those capitalistic solutions where everyone wins, but only kind of.

To my eye, this is in awful taste. But the story, I think, is kind of beautiful. If it's really true that the only two alternatives were to leave the flame unlit or to replace it with a cheesy simulation, I think, ultimately, that I would have made the same choice. And as we continue to oxidize the world's supply of hydrocarbons, sooner or later the sensibility of keeping fossil-fuel flames burning "eternally," only for symbolic purposes, may well become an issue in other parts of the world. [via Hack a Day]

Orrery based on Ferguson's "mechanical paradox"

Beautiful photographs by Tina Buescher of Jim Donnelly's orrery based on the mechanism known as "Ferguson's mechanical paradox." Good information about the orrery is provided by Ian Coote's page. As for the "paradox," well, it boils down to this: the three apparently-identical stacked gears on the end are driven by a single gear, yet move at different rates, which, of course, would be impossible if they were truly identical. News flash: They're not. But I'm sure it was harder to fight boredom in the 18th century than it is now, and the build is undeniably gorgeous.

October 21, 2009

Señores y señoras...El Sr. Bones y los Gourditos!

It looks like Mr. Bones does not actually have a singing part in this delightful orchestration of Danny Elfman's "This is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas by YouTuber HalloweenJared. He just bobs his head and taps his foot. (Maybe he needs a tambourine?) The anorexic front man for the Gourditos does, however, show off his famous vocal chops in their cover of Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash," and also here in a smoking duet version of the elder Ross Bagdasarian's "Witch Doctor." There's some how-to info on HalloweenJared's blog here. I wonder if they do funerals?

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

October 20, 2009

Pop-up Lego Zen temple is itself wonderfully Zen

It's like a pop-up book, kind of, except way more complicated and expensive and made of Lego elements by YouTube user talapz. Words fail me, too. [via The Brothers Brick]

October 19, 2009

Train an army of children to recycle bottles for you

There's an odd synchronicity here with last week's post about the coin-scavenging-crow training machine. This time it's a whack-a-mole style video game that you play by dropping glass bottles into the slots when they light up. See it work around 0:40.

In a side note, Volkswagen's Fun Theory Award is now definitely on my radar. Besides this project, their competition to incentivize socially-useful behaviors by turning them into entertainment also produced the world's deepest rubbish bin and the subway staircase piano keyboard. [via Hack a Day]

Awesome little needle-felted dragon

By deviantART user ~tallydragon. [via CRAFT]

Autobots invade Cleveland yard for Halloween

Pretty amazing yard art by YouTuber koUNit1. [via Geekologie]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

GPS-enabled puzzle box opens only at Île-de-Bréhat, France

The first presenter at last Thursday's Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his "Reverse Geocaching Puzzle." Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 attempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.