When I was a kid, I read in a science book about how to make a directional compass. You magnetize a sewing needle and balance it on a cork floating in a bowl of water. Even today, this is the standard story. For example, How Stuff Works still says that this is how to make a compass. (There are a lot of other examples, too.) It turns out that it’s a whole lot easier than that. All you need is a really good magnet.
Continue reading Super-Easy Supermagnet Compass
Once upon a time, we lived in a small apartment. Things got worse once we got a washer and dryer, because the hookups were in the tiny kitchen. In order to allow for comfortable dining space for three, it turned out that we needed to position the table up against one corner of the room. If we had a rectangular dining table, then someone would always have to sit at the pointy end of the table. If we had a round or oblong table, it would also be rather awkward. The solution was to build a new (funny shaped) table from scratch. And as long as we’re building something, why not make it unique?
Continue reading Mixed-Media Mosaic Dining Table
You have one drywall screw, one 1.5 V alkaline cell, six inches of plain copper wire, one small neodymium disk magnet, and no other tools or supplies. You have 30 seconds to make an electric motor running in excess of ten thousand RPM. Can you do it? Surprisingly enough, you can.
Continue reading How to make the simplest electric motor
What is a good science project and turns really fast? An electric motor! I built an electric motor for my school science project in third grade. It was fun to build and got a lot of attention at the school’s science fair.
I was looking in a book for a science project idea when I saw instructions for building an electric motor. My parents approved the idea, so Windell and I went looking for parts.
Continue reading Building an Electric Motor
Graduate school can do funny things to your head. Sometimes the urge to procrastinate becomes so overwhelming that you strike out in a great burst of creativity; determined to do something, anything, to avoid that which you’re supposed to be doing. Like the time that I painted my bicycle purple (with green polka dots) to avoid studying for my qualifying exam– but I seem to digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes: hard drive wind chimes. I used to disassemble hard drives, whenever possible, both to extract the magnets and to see how the different types worked. Different hard drives contain all kinds of wonderful components: voice coil motors, stepper motors, exotic bearings, electropolished machined parts, chemically etched metal webs, flexible circuitry, and my personal favorite: optical quadrature encoders for pivot arm position readout. The drive platters themselves are also quite remarkable: precisely made aluminum patters with a surface not unlike recording tape. The disks make a lovely clear note if you strike them, so it was only natural to make them into a set of wind chimes.
Continue reading How to make hard drive wind chimes
On a costumed bike ride, my red Princess Bride dress wrapped around my seat stay repeatedly and caught in my rear cog once. Not quite a total loss, since it looked post-fire-swamp with the holes and black streaks. However, it made me determined to fix the problem. You can see how I did it on instructables.
Continue reading DIY skirt guards
