I’m really enjoying Lego’s collectible minifig series, but they’re beginning to over flow the top of my book shelf, time to give them a more suitable home.

This is the second print block drawer that i have for displaying Lego figures. I put the first one up several years ago, it houses some of the classic space and castle figures form my childhood, along with some of the newer licensed characters. This one however was bought with the sole purpose of displaying the collectible minifig line.

There are plenty of these on ebay, they make great display frames for anything you can fit in them. The one above has nice regular openings, but others are more varied. This one will keep all the minfigs up to series 6 neatly arranged and adds a bit of character to my dining room wall.

I made this brooch as an 80th birthday present for my Gran. I came up with the idea of making a brooch involving some kind of planet design. It took quite a few revisions, but eventually I came up with something that I was happy with.

The construction involved CNC milling, silicone mould making and pewter casting to create the finished brooch.

My first sketch of the brooch

To find the position of the planets I used the Fourmilab Solar System Live site. This lets you enter a date and shows you the relative position of all the planets at that time, perfect.

After I had my basic map of the solar system, I had a new problem…coming up with an attractive design. I went through a lot of rough sketches:

My final paper sketch

The nice clean vector version

2D view of the tooling vectors

3D Relief of the Brooch

The Brooch machined into a slice of Delrin

The mould had some alterations

The channels have been opened up

The tinkering involved cutting the finest channels in the mould with a scalpel to enlarge them to the point where the pewter would flow reliably. I decided this would be  quicker than remaking the Delrin mould multiple times and that I could file/sand off the excess.

The two-part wooden back piece of the mould

Two of the things that I  discovered along the way that helped me get a cast I was happy with were that if you dust the silicone mould with talcum powder then that helps the pewter flow much more easily. Secondly, preheating everything I could also helped a lot with getting the pewter to flow into the thinnest sections. I used a heat gun to preheat the silicone mould and a blowtorch to preheat the metal funnel.

In the end I managed to get a cast I was happy with and then it was just a few hours of sanding away from being finished! Easy!

Finished cast pewter brooch

All in all I think it was worth the effort and the main thing was that my Gran really liked it.

The box features a switch and a hinged lid. When someone presses the switch an arm inside lifts the lid, switches the switch back in the opposite direction and then closes again. Useless, but strangely compelling.

After seeing the original most useless machine ever I couldn’t resist making one myself, not for myself though, this one was a present. As the site hosting the original is horrible, I used the nice clear instructions provided by Make Projects.

I spent some time looking for a suitable box to house the machine’s useless innards, but finding one the right sort of size without any ugly decoration proved tricky, so I opted to make the box myself.

The arm popping out to turn itself off

The clever bit is that the side of the switch which causes it to rotate back inside is wired in series with a microswitch which disconnects the power to the motor. The arm that pops out has a cam cut into the end nearest the motor which activates the microswitch once it has fully retracted, turning the machine off.

The machine consists of the following components:

• A box
• A DPST switch
• A microswitch
• A geared motor (I converted servo)
• A battery box
• Some kind of arm
• Hinges
• A battery box and batteries
• Thermoplastic
• Metal hooks
• Rubber bands

The wooden arm and elastic band keeping the lid tight

I made the wooden box and rotating arm from a single piece of pine from B & Q cut into sections which became the various sides and lid. I glued the  sides together and then secured with some small nails for extra stability.

The thermoplastic servo mount and other gubbins

The servo and arm wouldn’t quite fit in the box while horizontal so I had to devise a way to fix it in place at an angle. As time was tight I decided to make a mount for the  servo and microswitch using thermoplastic. This softens enough to be moulded by hand when heated above 60C and then when cool again becomes rigid.

The cam which operates the microswitch

I have a Sony Vaio laptop (model VGN-C1Z), which all of a sudden developed a serious illness. The screen was covered in lines during bootup, both the BIOS and Windows loading screens, then it would just blackout when Windows finally loaded. The lines over the BIOS screen told me it was a graphics card problem and being a laptop I feared the worst.  It turns out that I’m not the only one with this problem. The culprit here is the nVidia 7400 GPU. It seems that as the chip gets hot and cools down repeatedly, the solder bonds under the chip are weakened and eventually become faulty.

Now, it stands to reason that if the only error is poor solder connections, that I should be able to heat the chip up again and reflow the solder to create nice strong bonds again. Well to test my theory I booted the laptop, pressed F8 to get the windows boot menu and started in VGA mode. This let the laptop start Windows, albeit with everything looking huge due to the 800×600 resolution. Then I played helpful 720p videos until the laptop got very hot. A reboot later and the lines on the screen had disappeared! The laptop had magically resoldered itself. Sadly this didn’t last and the problem quickly returned.

An easy way to keep track of the screws

Heatsink and motherboard

nVidia chip is the medium sized one on the right

Update – 5th June 2011: Added some pictures I’d taken of the process to make things clearer.

2011 – the year of the sausage! or so it seems. Having received a sausage stuffing machine for Christmas, I spent most of my January weekends making sausages. The Sausage Sausage dog is the sequel to our Dalek Bread in our food with silly names series.

Sausage making is great fun, like all good hobbies it’s easy to pick up but difficult to master. Homemade sausages are easily more tasty than the cheap supermarket ones, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to make ones as nice as our local butcher.

The sausage sausage dog came from my third attempt, my first at a fancy sausage, namely pork and apple. These were much better than the first two tries earlier in the monnth, I had a better idea of the required consistency and soaking the meat for 24 hour in apple juice surely helped as well.

My guide through what i can legitimately call a sausage fest has been
The Sausge Book by Paul Peacock an excellant book that explains an awful lot (even how to twist and bunch them up). The skins I’ve been using are from this eBay store.

More Sausage making pictures can be seen in this flickr set. Sadly, things didn’t end well for the sausage sausage dog, he died due to a fatal frying pan related incident the following morning, just before breakfast

My wife likes chocolate yet she never wants an advent calendar, so I decided to make her the ultimate chocolate advent calendar.

Materials

• 22 x standard bars of Cadbury’s dairy milk
• 1 x medium sized bar (her birthday is on the 4th of December)
• 1 x 1kg bar of dairy milk
• Tinsel
• 4′x2′ sheet of mdf
• Hot glue
• Sticky foam pads
• Sticky bows
• Silver spray paint
• Sticky Shiny Numbers 1-24

The MDF sheet was spray painted silver and tinsel hot glued around the edge for decoration. Each small had 2 sticky pads stuck to the back and a square of purple card with the appropiate number stuck to the front. The kilogram bar had several sheets of sticky pads and 2 sticks of hot glue to hold it on.

Construction time was about 3 hours (an awful lot of sticky pad peeling was involved) with an hour or so of that waiting for the paint to dry.

My Wife loved it (it was after all mostly chocolate) and has a few jealous friends who have to make do with the a standard advent calendar.

More photos on Flickr

I’m quite interested in robots with organic movement, the sort of thing that looks creepy due to its unnatural naturalness and with this in mind I’ve started looking into building a robotic/animatronic tentacle arm (Japanese schoolgirls beware!). My first step was to have a look at the sort of thing floating about on youtube already, I’ve compiled some of the best examples into a playlist.

The basic structure seems to be a set of ribs with guide holes for wires, spaced along the length of a flexible tube. Control wires run up through the ribs and are tied off at the end of the arm so that when they are pulled at the base the arm flexes outward toward the side that the cable is on. To get a feel for the workings I decided to knock up my own simple version using cardboard ribs and 3 control wires. I made the template rib shown below and copied it multiple times to fill a sheet of A4 paper (print @ 300dpi for correct scaling).

Rib segment template

I printed out my page of ribs and glued it down to some scrap cardboard, then I cut out 8 or so (I would have done more but got bored). Once I had a stack of arm segments I looked around for something suitable to use as the flexible core, the first thing that came to hand was the inner tube of an old biro laying on my desk. I made holes in all the rib segments using a pin and scissors, then started to thread them onto my biro core. To keep the segments separated I cut short (15mm approx.) lengths of clear plastic air tubing, the sort used in fish tanks. These fitted snugly over the core and were stiff enough to add strength to the arm.

Once I’d stacked up as many segments as would fit (7), I cut 3 lengths of fishing line and ran them up through the ribs to the top end of the pen, where I tied a simple slipknot in the end of each piece and tightened them over the biro. To hold the whole lot vertical I simply clamped the biro tube in a small vice.

I was thinking about making some kind of joystick contraption to control the arm to begin with but after a quick sketch and a cup of tea realised that I was over-thinking things considering the rough state of the arm, and I decided instead to use a marionette style controller made from two pencils taped into a cross shape. I did cut a flat into the middle of each pencil to stop them twisting away from square, but even that might have been overkill. I notched the ends too so that the fishing line could be secured easily, again using slip knots, and that was pretty much it.

The expertly crafted tentacle arm and controller

It works quite well given the simplicity of the setup and has definitely made me want to go on to a slightly more complex version, probably using my CNC machine to cut the next set of ribs from MDF or plywood.

After seeing this article on Hackaday describing an easy to make silicone casting  material I knew I had to give it a quick go.  The photos here show the results of making a mold of a polymer clay heart and then making a heart shaped ice cube from it.

Oogoo is basically equal parts corn flour and sealant, mixed into a white goo.  This Instructable has all the details for making Oogoo and fully documents its many uses.

Mixing Oogoo takes a bit of effort, I used a cardboard tub as a container and an old paintbrush handle to mix with, this probably made it more difficult than it needed to be  but that’s what I had to hand.

Once mixed, i found it quite difficult to spread over my heart form, next time i plan to wear latex gloves and shape it by hand.

Even with my shoddy mixing, crappy tools and less than ideal spreading technique, I ended up with a usable mold in around 2- 3 hours. To test it out, I simply filled it with water and froze it for an hour or two.

As you can see, the Ice heart isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close.  A definite success!

In future, if I need to make a mold for any reason,  Oogoo is going to be my first port of call, its quick, cheap and absolutely stinks of vinegar. What more could you want?

I was looking for a project that involved mould making, and asked my girlfriend if she wanted me to make her anything…she decided on some Seahorse earrings, so I set to work.

As you can see in the image above, I started by creating a 3D model in a fantastic program called ZBrush which allows you to sculpt digitally. When I was happy with the model I imported it into Artcam, a program for creating CNC toolpaths. I layed the model out mirrored so I could make a two-part mould. I included registration holes/bumps so that the two halves would line up correctly later on. Finally the mould was milled on my CNC machine into a slice of Delrin plastic, which cuts nice and cleanly.

Above you can see the silicone that will become the final mould setting in the Delrin master. I used RTV-101 from a company called Tiranti. I chose it because it’s temperature resistant to over 250C and so would be perfect for pewter casting. It’s fully cured in 5 hours or so, I just left it over night.

Here you can see the nice silicone cast. It’s taken up the detail really well and I managed to get rid of all the air bubbles with some strategic tapping when I poured the silicone.

Here’s a close up shot of the silicone mould.

The mould was then trimmed and cut in two. Luckily the registration holes lined up as planned.

The two halves fit together nicely. You can see the air channel to the left of the pouring hole.

For pouring I clamped the mould halves between some bit of MDF.

This is my first cast from the mould. I used some black polyurethane casting resin that I had as it was a bit easier than messing about with pewter. It came out very well, the only dodgy bit was the very end of the tail, but that was my fault for putting the air channel in right above it.

Ah a fine little fellow! It’s a good feeling to get a proper physical version of something that you created on a computer.

Finally we have the finished product. Casting in pewter wasn’t quite as easy as the plastic. It doesn’t like to flow into all the crevices of the mould on its own, so I made a simple metal funnel with some pipe and the end of a small CO2 canister (the kind you find in BB guns). I heated the funnel up in the blowtorch I was using to melt the pewter, this stopped the metal solidifying instantly instead of flowing into the mould. With a pair of pliers I held my funnel into the opening of the silicone mould and then quickly poured the pewter. Because it has nowhere else to go, the weight of the metal above forces the pewter into all the corners nicely. Before using the funnel I was getting very poor detail and incomplete filling.

After giving them a bit of a polish and hooking some earring bits through the holes, they were done! I’m pretty happy with the way they came out, pretty close to my original computer model at least.

The Grim Reaper’s garden was originally very different. My intention was a nice scene featuring typical model railway figures. When I got to the model shop, this fella caught my eye, how could i not buy Death? Once you have Death, the graveyard follows pretty quickly.

More mini garden goodness after the jump.

Dino Gardens 3, 4 and 5

Dino garden 3 is similar to the original. Nothing really new in its construction.

Dino Garden 4 was an attempt at a more barren landscape. This garden uses reindeer moss as bare bushes, a crack runs through the ground revealing lava underneath.

Dino Graden 5 is less bleak, and features my first ever tree! The tree is made from very thin wire, polymer clay and the same scatter material that features throughout this series.  Making the tree was very fiddly, but I’m pleased with the outcome.

I’m working on Dino Gardens 6 and 7 as i write this. Normally, i’m a one off sort of person, very bad at repeatability. This series has been somewhat unusual for me, doing several similar things, it has however been very enjoyable and quite theraputic.

Fancy making your own?