Make: Online: Toolbox Archives

Toolbox Archive: Toolbox

July 9, 2009

Is the Leatherman Fuse a dud?

On the heels of our Toolbox column on knives and multitools comes news of a new tool in the Leatherman family, the Knifeless Fuse. The tool is marketed for "knife-prohibitive situations" and has everything you'd expect on a similar multitool (needlenose/regular pliers, two wire cutters, wire stripper, small/large/Phillips screwdrivers, scissors, file, can/bottle opener, 8″ ruler) except for a blade. But as Steven Leckart says on BB Gadgets: "...The thing's still potentially-lethal and probably won't get through TSA. So really, I don't get it." We don't either.

Leatherman Fuse [via Toolmonger]

July 7, 2009

Titanium (!) fire piston

Miami's exodus125 makes these custom titanium (!) fire pistons himself. They're pricey, and in point of fact there's not much need for titanium (!) in this application when aluminum works just as well and costs way, way less, but still: Titanium! Besides its well-known physical properties--lightweight, noncorroding, and extremely tough--titanium (!) has also been proven to cloud the minds of otherwise rational consumers like me, inducing irrational bouts of spending accompanied by mild ptyalism.

Make your own knife and tool sheaths

One of the comments in my knife and multitool Toolbox column pointed to a webpage which pointed to a webpage which pointed to a posting of this nice and straightforward article from an issue of Leather Craft, on making your own knife sheaths.

[To see the rest of the article, just advance the last digit in the URL, with "-9.jpg" as the last page]

Make your own knife sheaths

July 6, 2009

Toolbox: Knives out!

In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.

This week, we look at knives and multitools. Many of us remember getting our first pocket knives as kids -- the simple satisfaction found in whittling and carving, cooking on a campfire, or just semi-irresponsibly flinging it around. And the multitool, that knife with an identity complex -- it can't help but make you feel at least a little MacGyver-esque the first time you slot one onto your belt.

Since many of us use such tools every day -- it's our default tool -- it takes on a special place in our universe of important implements. In other words, knives and multitools are kind of personal. So, in that light, I empty my pockets (drawers, toolboxes) and show you my knife collection. And Sean Ragan shares some of his.

What knifes and multitools do you use? Tell us about them, what you like and don't like about them, in the comments.

Sebenza Chris Reeves Knives
I was sent one of these amazing knives to review when I was writing tool reviews for National Geographic Adventure and I cherish it. I don't know if I could bring myself to pony up over $300 for a pocket knife, but it is a gorgeous piece. It has a Zen-like quality to it; it's a very simply-constructed blade, but it's done with such impeccable craftsmanship and high-quality materials, oh and it has a titanium body, so it feels like air in your hand -- air that can make you bleed. My friend Peter Sugarman, who likes sharp objects, once said to me: "A good blade -- it WANTS to cut you." This must be a good blade 'cause I was bleeding moments after taking it out of the box (trying to get the feel of its one-handed opening).

Leatherman Wave
I've had, and have been writing about, the Leatherman since their first classic tool. I got the Wave over ten years ago, use it all the time, and it's still in near-perfect shape. When I first got the tool, I didn't like the flexion in the two body pieces (when you're using the tools from inside the handles, and it still feels a little sloppy). I still don't like it. Don't know if they fixed that in subsequent editions. I know they updated the drivers to be reversible (flat and Phillips), in both the micro and full bit-sizes. The newer Waves also have rulers (8"/19cm) on the body, which is a nice addition.

Leatherman Squirts
We sell the Squirts in the Maker Shed and they're admirable keychain multitools.

Squirt E4 (aka the "Make: bomb defuser")
This Squirt has wire-cutters (gauges 12-20) as the plier tool, with a needlenose tip. You wouldn't want this to be your only set of common tools, you wouldn't even want this to be your only multitool, but as a keychain/pocket tool, it's come in handy more than once. This is also a great tool for the dressed-up geek (or gearhead). You can't very well wear a Wave on your belt with your wedding n' funeral duds, but you can carry a Squirt in your pocket, in your purse, or on a garter holster for you Lady Derringer-types. The Maker Shed version has "Make: bomb defuser" laser-etched on one side of the body.

Squirt P4 (aka the "Make: Warranty Voider")
This Squirt has the same toolset as the E4, but with needlenose pliers. The Maker Shed version has "Make: warranty voider" etched on one side of the body.

Squirt S4 (aka the "i Craft: things")
The Maker Shed sells this scissors version of the Squirt with "i Craft: things" etched on the body.

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IC wallet from chess-case

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member lovro made clever use of a portable game board/case as an ESD safe wallet

July 5, 2009

Super scissors

These scissors are the most versatile ones I have seen. They were a gimmie at a Revereware shop that closed recently, buy one get one. I bought about four pairs with different colored handles. The black handled ones live on the workbench, a red handled pair stays in the kitchen and some others are reserved for crafting.

What makes them incredible? They are sharp, stainless steel scissors with decent sized handles, suitable for big hands. The two sides come apart for easy cleaning. The ends of the handles have large and small screwdrivers, and one side sports a bottle opener. Inside the handles is a grippy section for opening difficult jars. They are suitable for lots of kitchen and other tasks in the house, garden, and yard.

July 3, 2009

Power drill coffee grinder

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Timothy J Silverman used the burrs from a peppermill to convert his drill into a handy coffee grinder. Use this along with the drill scrambler and you've got yourself a real workshop power breakfast!

Update: The maker adds -

I don't recommend using peppermill innards to grind coffee. They grind better than a commercial propeller-style grinder. But they're just too small to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.

The next iteration will use real coffee burrs from a real coffee grinder. I found some to salvage, but they're also available as replacement parts. Then I can use a hand crank instead of the drill. That should make those who share my office, where this device is normally used, happier.

July 2, 2009

Motorcycle brake rotor repair kludge

My dad recently took a minor tumble on his motorcycle. He's fine, but the bike was banged up a bit, including a bent brake rotor. Consensus among his buddies in the Magna Owners of Texas was that the rotor would have to be replaced, but of course they're pricey, and since the rotor was "shot" anyway, Dad figured he might as well try to straighten it and see what happened.

Here's what he did, in his own words:

Since I had mounted the tire/wheel on the axle in my vice to polish the wheel, it was a simple matter to rig up the "feeler" shown in the first picture to check out the rotor flatness. Just a piece of copper wire about AWG 7 to 9 or thereabouts -- I had in my electrical junk box. With a light behind the setup, one can use the reflection of the end of the wire from the rotor surface to obtain a very sensitive indication of warp when one spins the tire/wheel. Brought it back to planar using a soft face (brass) hammer. Go slow, it takes some time. "Sneak up on it" by whacking gently, measure, whack a little harder, measure, etc. until it yields just a bit.

Then, concerned that the rotor needed to be flatter than he could detect with the naked eye, he rigged up a second jig to test it:

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June 30, 2009

Introducing the Fiat 500 Bulldozer

Ironsmith Kogoro Kurata took the body of a Fiat 500 and put it on an old set of Cat tracks. Tortoise-timed trips to the store, and hilarity, ensued.

Monkey Farm [via Pink Tentacle]

Lithophane-making with the Micro CNC

MAKE contributor Steve Lodefink posted results from his Lumenlab Micro CNC's maiden voyage -

Lithophanes were a popular way to hide girlie pictures in the bottom a of gentleman's tea cup around the end of the 19th century. An image would be molded into the porcelain in the cup so that only when held up to a light would the picture be visible.
[...]
I "lithophaned" an image of a skull into a piece of corian. When viewed under normal front lighting, it sort of looks like a distorted C-3P0 face, but when held up to a light source, it is transformed into a skull.

Check out video of the 'skullithophanery' in process over @ Finkbuilt.

June 28, 2009

Make: Projects - Magnetic toolbox

My Dad got a shiny new red tractor the week before Father's Day, which created a great opportunity for an easy, inexpensive, handmade gift: I bought a classic little red toolbox, to match the tractor, and fitted it with eight 3/4" ring supermagnets on the bottom to make it stick to the fender. There's a rubber washer between each magnet and the bottom of the toolbox, to cushion the magnets, each of which is secured using a 3/4" automotive panel fastener--basically a barbed plastic push fastener.

Inserted through the hole in the magnet, through the rubber washer, and through a 1/4" hole drilled in the bottom of the toolbox, the panel fastener secures everything in place. The head of the fastener also makes a nice black plastic "foot" on the bottom of each magnet, which protects the finish on the tractor from marring against the magnet, without being so thick as to block magnetic attraction.

More:

June 27, 2009

Future death machine nose art

I'm pretty sure this TrueType font designed in 1998 by the now-apparently-defunct "Dragon's Den Type Foundry" was intended for players of Games Workshop's Warhammer: 40K tabletop wargame.

But c'mon, seriously: what project wouldn't be improved by a little faux-fascist heraldry? Perhaps a flying skull transfixed by a dagger and with lightning shooting from its eyes?

I can't think of one either.

June 26, 2009

In the Maker Shed: MAKE: Warranty Voider - Leatherman

Small enough to fit on your key chain, the MAKE Warranty Voider is the perfect companion for mobile fixing, hacking and MacGyvering. This is a limited offering with custom "MAKE: Warranty Voider" laser lovingly etched with care using a 35w laser.

More about the MAKE: Warranty Voider - Leatherman "Squirt" P4 (plier version)

June 25, 2009

How-To: Magnify your workbench

William Grill needed a better view of his work surface for project prototyping. Using an inexpensive color video camera, he was able to create a simple display system that shows his work at 12x on his PC monitor. "It's amazing what detail you can see when you view your solder surface mounted parts at 7-, 10- or even 15-times," he writes.

Gadget Freak Case #135: Magnify Your Workbench

June 22, 2009

Toolbox: Writing/planning tools

I have a love/hate relationship with organizational technology. I'm an anarchist at heart -- I hate rules, authority, order, doing what's expected. At the same time, I have to manage a fairly dizzying amount of complexity in my workflow, and that necessitates having to be organized. I vacillate between embracing it (reading productivity books and sites like 43Folders and Lifehacker) and rebelling against it. Within these perpetual oscillations, I managed to get a lot of stuff done, so however torturous the process, it seems to work for me. Below is the content of my writing/planning toolbox. I got a great response to my call for tool suggestions for this column. I figured, since these tools work in concert with each other, to keep each contributor's toolset intact. This is only a sampling of what people sent. Many items were redundant (Moleskines, Maker's Notebooks, Sharpies, Varsity pens). Add your favorite writing tools (my emphasis is on analog, but digital too -- whatever you actually use and find most useful).

Gareth's Tools:

The Maker's Notebook
I know I was involved in this project and I'm far from impartial, but I love The Maker's Notebook, I got flamed out on Boing Boing for claiming that the Notebook actually *encourages* me to do more brainstorming, drawing, scheming, but it does! The Moleskine drawing notebook I used beforehand did the same thing. I think any great writing tool (or any type of tool) seduces you want to use it. I use my Maker's Notebook for all of my preliminary project planning, sketches, diagrams, and brainstorms -- at least any of this that I do away from the computer. This column started out as a page in my Maker's Notebook.

Moleskine Cahier Pocket Notebook (blank paper version)
I always keep one of these in my pocket. I've used them for years and have a nice collection of multiple volumes stuffed with my big (and little) ideas. I use these for miscellaneous thoughts, quotes I want to capture, book excerpts, fragmentary ideas, poetry and pearls o' wisdom. I've been writing a novel for the past couple of years and all of my notes for that are in about six volumes of these notebooks.

Hipster PDA
These simple paper PDAs were such an advancement for me. With a pack of 3 x 5 cards and a box of binder clips, I made a bunch of these that I keep all over the house (with a pen): By my bed, in the TV, kitchen, in the john, etc. Now I never have a thought and am without the means to capture it. I keep one of these in my pocket too and use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, temporary notes, anything I don't need to keep. The ones around the house capture any type of thought, and at the end of the week, I go around and collect up all the used cards and transfer them to notebooks or wherever else the info needs to go. This simple "creativity hack" has changed my creative/work life very dramatically (talk about bang for the buck!).

Omnifocus
This Mac and iPhone-based personal information manager (PIM) is awesome. It's built around the Getting Things Done system, to which I haphazardly adhere. Having my desktop Mac, MacBook, and iPhone all in-sync with my to-do lists for dayplanning/project outlining is a godsend, and it does it fairly effortlessly.

Evernote
I love this free app (for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Blackberry) that allows you to send images, text, audio, and web clippings into the cloud from any of these devices. I frequently get ideas in the middle of the night, or want to record dreams. I speak them into my phone in bed and they're sent to my online Evernote account. Evernote also has character recognition within images, so you can, for instance, take a phonecam image of a business card and later search on the text of that card in Evernote or the text for something you've scribbled on a napkin and photographed. Just be sure to scribble legibly.

Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen
I've sung the praises of these pens before. I'm still singing. I freak out if I can't find one at my disposal and have to resort to a "lesser" tool. You can easily re-fill them yourself, so you don't have to dispose of them, which is good 'cause they're hard to find in stationary/ office stores (most of the time you have to special order them).

Pentel Mechanical Pencils
I've had the same Pentel pencil for the past 20 years. It still works and so I keep filling it with lead. I don't do that much technical drawing anymore, so I don't use it very frequently.

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Magnetized mouse keyboard

Over at Gizmo Projects, they tidied up their desk by installing magnets in a wireless keyboard and mouse so they can stick to the wall when not in use. I have a stand for my wireless keyboard (with built-in trackpad) and I love having actual desk space when I need it.

Up, up, and out of the way

Online resistor code tool

Dave Fowler, of uC Hobby, sent us a link to this java app for determining resistor code values. There are a lot of these resistor ID tools floating around, in different formats -- it's nice to have the option to use which one works best for you and your circumstances (for instance, I don't have a computer at my workbench, so it's easiest for me to just use my DMM or one of those paper dial IDers I got from Radio Shack several decades ago). But YMMV.

Online Resistor Color Code Tool

June 18, 2009

Miniature drill

From the MAKE Flickr pool, this is a tiny functioning drill.

June 14, 2009

Literary gold mine for CNC millers

From 1976 to 1983, Popular Science magazine, along with the American Plywood Association, ran an annual plywood panel project design contest for its readership. Often the winning projects were items of furniture, but that was not a requirement. A potter's kick wheel and a folding plywood boat are notable exceptions. The rules were simple: Apart from common fasteners, the entire project had to be constructed from one or more panels of plywood, cut to make most efficient use of the material. In 1984, these projects were collected, by original contest editor Alfred W. Lees, into a book called 67 Prizewinning Plywood Projects.

1984, of course, was decades prior to the advent of accessible home CNC milling, so all those carefully shaped and slotted parts, at the time, had to be laboriously hand-cut using a jigsaw or similar tool. Today, the book is a rich, untapped resource for CNC enthusiasts. I scored a used copy on Amazon, and besides the projects themselves, the book yields a bumper crop of ideas for clever tricks to incorporate into your own designs.

June 13, 2009

Tessellating lizard pavers

[Editor's Note: There used to be a post here about some Escher-esque molds for creating tessellating gecko-patterned paving stones out of concrete. The creator of the molds got all 20th century (19th century?) on us and demanded that we take down the post (something about needing to negotiate a contract and cut a deal before publishing anything on the Web). We've removed all direct references to his product, but left up the post to retain the comments. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

Props to Steve for submitting this.