Remember when we would play with those little balsa wood planes and try to tweak them for better flights? Well this guy has pretty much taken that to a whole new level. I love the attention to detail like giving the wings more lift by warping them with water and an Ace bandage. The video of his flight makes it well worth the effort.
Category: Mods
Alternative Limbs Project
if you have to have an artificial limb due to either trauma or birth defect you might as well have one with some serious style. I’d personally want exposed gears and pistons and some neon backlighting. This is a wonderful project, I can only hope that other artists and creative types step up and try this medium.
[Via Dude Craft]
Homemade LowFi Digital Camera
Very cool!!! I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a ‘Lomo’ mod, as there are no Lomo camera parts in it and the lens is a magnitude of quality better then any plastic that has ever graced a toy camera body. Still, the effects are rather stylistic.
Take a cheap Vivitar digital camera, strip the body and lens off, add a nice lens mount and some fancy looking hand brushed aluminum U rails for a body and you have a serviceable camera. I’d add a ultra wide auxilary lens to the prime to get a nicer field of view but other than that this is something to be duplicated. Now where did I put that old camera…
[via MAKE]
R/C Truck in Afghanistan Saves 6 Soldiers’ Lives
Very cool use of off the shelf tech.
The little truck was used by the troops to run ahead of them on patrols and look for roadside bombs. Fessenden has had it since 2007, when Ernie and Kevin Guy, the owner of the Everything Hobby shop in Rochester, rigged it with a wireless video camera and shipped it to him.
Last week, it paid off. Chris Fessenden said he had loaned the truck to a group of fellow soldiers, who used it to check the road ahead of them on a patrol. It got tangled in a trip wire connected to what Fessenden guesses could have been 500 lbs. of explosives. The bomb went off. The six soldiers controlling the truck from their Humvee were unhurt.
Remote Controlled Truck Sent to Soldier in Afghanistan Saves 6 Soldiers’ Lives – ABC News.
Clever Kinetic Sculpture
Nice little kinetic ball sorting thing. The video (might take some time to load, it’s coming from China) has enough close up shots that is would not be that tough to duplicate this. I need to find a good supply of that brass wire he uses, looks like it’s brazing rod so it shouldn’t be too hard to locate some. I see a trip to Harbor Freight in my future!
Funny DIY Device With Subtle Control of Steel Balls’ tracks
The Mechanical Mustache
“A mustache party? By Jove I’ll be there!” I exclaimed as I dashed forth from my lab!
I few weeks ago I got wind of a party that the local hackerspace here in the greater Phoenix area was having. They decided to celebrate their one year anniversary by holding a mustache party. So I decided to live the hacker dream and build my own mustache (yes, I have a natural one but that was easy to make).
Take a look at the process that I went through to build my creation. I give you the Mechanical Mustache Project!