Fun with Shoe-Goo: Reinforcing Skate Sneakers With Leather Scraps
Growing up one of the tricks we’d do to protect our sneakers would be cutting the suede or leather tongue off an old shoe and glueing it to the spot where you’d get a hole from ollieing. It worked incredibly well! The Vision Street Wear ones were particularly good for this.
Read MoreWonderfully Simple Joby Gorillapod Broken Leg Fix
It’s pretty great what you can do with simple heat shrink tubing!
Read MoreHow I Fixed My Shaking iPhone 6S Plus Rear Camera
My wife’s phone camera has been very shaky for a few months now. It’s awful. Apple said they couldn’t fix it, so I took it on myself to give it a shot. Good news, I pulled it off. Here’s how.
Read MoreMake a Skull from your CT Scan
A few years ago I had CT scans taken of my head and upper body. A while later, I decided to see if I could obtain the files, and called the hospital. To my surprise, they were quickly agreeable and mailed me a DVD with everything on it. I was able to click through most of the images with Photoshop, but wasn’t able to do much more with the individual slices. Then I found some open-source software that let me access professional-grade features like reconstructing the slices into a 3D render and — very excitingly — letting you export those as STLs. That meant I could 3D print them!
Catapult madness at the Craftsman Makecation
In August 2014, I helped as an exhibitor at the Craftsman Makecation at Lake Arrowhead. My project: A waterballon-launching trebuchet. With the help of Chris Weisbart, Rob North, and Mark Clement, I assembled this medium-sized machine and had fun launching balloons over the resort with it.
Also: Rob Riggle was there.
This beer-powered Slug trap Totally Works
Where I live, we seem to get an abundance of slugs. I let the trails across the driveway and garage door pass, but once they started chewing through all the seedlings in the garden, I decided I needed to do some population control.
There are a few different slug trap designs on Thingiverse, all which use the same method of attracting the slugs to a basin of beer (yes, beer), which they drink, get drunk, fall in, and drown. It’s a little sad, but the garden must survive this season.
Oversized Halloween Witch Silhouette
Last Halloween my wife showed me a Halloween lawn ornament she liked and asked if I could make one like it. Challenge accepted.
I began by searching on the internet for witch silhouettes. I found an image of one that looked particularly spooky and saved it.
Next, I’d need to make a large print of this. I opened the image in Illustrator to convert it to a vector image, which would allow me to resize it, and converted it with the “live paint” function. Then I removed the fill and added a single-line stroke around the image.
Video Roundup: More DIY Skate Ramps
It’s been a while since I’ve run through the resources for building skate ramps that exist online. And with so many now appearing on Youtube, I’ll focus this post on those plans and builds that appear there in video form. Let me know if I miss anything — especially if it is your build.
Read MoreQuick Fix: Broken Laundry Rack
My family uses this laundry rack all the time, so when the wind blew it over and cracked one of the top rails (rendering it surprisingly unstable, I’ll add), I realized I needed to repair or replace it quick. A few wraps of tape would be a fast solution but most likely be too floppy to be effective, so I thought about adding a sleeve that would hold both sides of the break together like a cast on a broken bone. I first considered using heat-shrink tubing, but then I realized I could quickly 3D print something that is designed for the exact size of the doweling. I love a good functional print.
Read MoreWhat If I Had Bought Bitcoins Instead of Backing Kickstarters?
Bitcoin is red hot right now. Like everyone, I’m full of silly regret for not having put all my savings into it when it was super new and dirt cheap — even a small investment at the start would be worth a fortune now. Instead, I waited a few years and bought 0.1 bitcoin for $100 when its price was at a then-peak of $1000. It promptly plummeted.
Then, years later, it skyrocketed.
With Bitcoin’s price flirting with $20,000 over the past month, I got curious to what could have been in various scenarios, mostly one where, instead of putting money into another platform that launched around the same time, Kickstarter, I had put the same amount of money into buying Bitcoins. Read More
Hi, I'm Mike. I’m the executive editor of Make: magazine, and host of Discovery channel’s Punkin' Chunkin' and Catch It Keep It, TV shows where I build and explain crazy machines that crush stuff, blow things up, shoot fire, all in the name of science.
I've previously worked at Wired and ReadyMade magazines, writing about how to utilize new technology in our everyday lives.
This site is where I keep a list of instructions for fun projects I've done, am working on, or draw inspiration from. I encourage everyone to get involved — get up and do something!