A nice piece on how to make a sharp knife out of a plain strip of metal (or a butter knife) without any tools. Interesting because it’s so simple, yet still useful.
Knife Making Without Tools [link]
This instructional video shows you how to make lock picks out of hacksaw blades and tools you probably have around the house.
Please use responsibly.
Make your own Lock Picks [link]
This is a special link to a 17 minute video of a Claude Paillard building his own vacuum tubes by hand in his shop. I’m totally speechless at the quality of his workmanship. Very impressive. Watch it, even if you know nothing about vacuum tubes, just to have an idea of what’s involved and to see him at work.
The page is in French, but that shouldn’t stop you as the video doesn’t contain any verbal explications.
This instructable shows you how to build kick-ass bike frames. One in carbon fiber, and the second one out of… carbon fiber and bamboo! It looks amazing too - sure to be a head-turner!
How I built a carbon bike frame at home (and a bamboo frame too) [link]
A sales rep from Freemansupply.com has posted a bunch of instructional videos that show various techniques used to build casting molds using various chemicals. Although they suggest to use a specific brand of products, these videos would still be a great visual complement to any mold making instructions.
Do It Yourself Mold Making:
Here are a few tutorials on bookbinding. Using these techniques, you can repair old books, or make your own. You can even make your own notebooks using recycled paper or with paper you made yourself. These make great gifts. Hurry up, only 9 7 days until Festivus!
DIY Bookbinding:
Edited debember 17th:
I had to add this great tutorial by Micheal Shannon:
- Make Your Own Moleskin [link]
This nice set of instructions shows you how to make your own paper from recycled paper. If you’re like most people, you get lots of flyers, papers and ads in your mailbox (I don’t because we have official stickers we can put on our mailboxes that say we don’t want any unsolicited bulk mail in Montréal). Nevertheless, I still get some bills and non-bulk paper waste. Handmade paper is much more interesting than its industrially produced equivalent. It has a texture, and each sheet is unique and special.
<rant>This project could appeal to scrapbookers. Real DIY ones, not the ones that buy cheesy pre-made kits or stupid sticker sheets. Scrapbooking should be about recycling, not generating more waste.</rant>
Imagine binding your own book (I’ll post something about that this weekend) made of paper you made yourself. You could also make your own holiday cards with them, or whatever project you can think of.
Egg tempera is a painting technique that’s been around for hundreds of years. Today, we mainly know two types of painting: acrylic and oil paintings. Acrylic paint is water-based. Oil paint is, well, oil based (hence the long drying time - oil takes more time to evaporate than water). Egg tempera is, like acrylic paint, water based, but the medium isn’t a synthetic chemical: it’s egg yolk! Egg yolk is actually an excellent medium for preserving pigment, and it dries clear (completely clear after a few weeks).
Egg tempera produces high quality results, as you can see with the portrait shown above. Durable too: that painting dates back to the XIV
Egg Tempera Painting [link] [another link]
This is a great tutorial on how to make a cheap Aluminum (or aluminium, depending on where you live) Forge. What’s especially nice is that you don’t need anything special. In fact I think I have everything that’s needed to build it in my basement. I wouldn’t do it in the house though, for multiple safety reasons, and since there’s a couple of feet of snow outside, I’ll have to wait until next spring to tackle this project. Maybe you’re lucky and have a garage, or live in a temperate climate.
Once you’ve smelted whatever aluminum scraps you had on hand (old parts, soda cans, etc.), you can use the molten metal to make ingots for later use, or you can pour them into molds to cast whatever you’d like.
Smelting metal is obviously dangerous and should be done very carefully. When doing potentially risky projects like that, I make sure I’m not alone, just in case something happens.
Aluminum factoids:
Aluminum Forge [link]
