Frank Ippolito shows you how you can measure the hardness of various materials around your shop using a simple durometer tester. Useful for replicating rubbers in propmaking!
Frank Ippolito shows you how you can measure the hardness of various materials around your shop using a simple durometer tester. Useful for replicating rubbers in propmaking!
Adam visits the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, where he learns about how they nurture the interests and skills of the very youngest makers. While there, he also sees the PERFECT tape holder (that he later replicates for the shop) and learns how to operate a loom for the first time! (This series and tour is made possible by The Fab Foundation and Chevron.)
I'm sure we've all had the experience of watching a huge airliner fly overhead at what appears to be an impossibly slow speed. Most of these jets have to be moving at least 240 kilometers per hour (150 miles per hour) just to get off the ground. Although we certainly realize that they are actually flying quite swiftly, that knowledge doesn't jibe with the tortoise-like pace that our eyes are seeing.
We can recreate flying replicas of airplanes in just about any imaginable size and level of detail. Yet, that illusion of speed (or lack thereof) almost never translates well. Most RC models appear to be flying much faster than their full-scale brothers. Martin Müller decided to address that disconnect.
Martin's idea was to create a scale model of an Airbus A310 airliner that would fly at scale speeds. This meant that his 2-meter-span (79 in) Airbus (approximately 1/22-scale) would have a takeoff speed of about 3 meters per second (6.7 mph). Martin knew that creating a model capable of flying at such slow speeds would require an extreme emphasis on shedding weight and more than a little bit of clever thinking.
Müller is no stranger to innovation in the RC world. Around 2003, he developed the Ikarus Shock Flyer, a series of highly aerobatic models made of simple sheet foam with carbon fiber bracing. While the Shock Flyers were meant for indoor aerobatic competitions, they unintentionally spawned a whole new genre of RC models: profile foamies. These types of models can be dreamt, designed, and built in a matter of a few hours. More-traditional balsa designs often require weeks or months to get off the ground. Martin also designed several molded-foam models for Multiplex, including the Park Master, Gemini, and uber-popular Fun Cub.
Adam Savage gets up close with the one-of-a-kind 3D-printed endoskeleton Weta Workshop made for the upcoming Ghost in the Shell. Chatting with Weta Workshop technician Jared Haley in the studio's 3D modeling room, Adam learns about the experimentation and prototyping necessary to make this gobsmackingly beautiful prop.
Adam has undertaken a national makerspace tour designed to highlight innovation in maker education, entrepreneurship and workforce development! In this first video of the series, Adam visits Intermediate Unit 1, a K-12 special and alternative education school in Grindstone, PA,
South by Southwest festival begins this week and the city of Austin, Texas is buzzing with excitement and creativity! Adam and artist Jen Schachter have been collaborating on a Maker-themed scavenger hunt celebrating inventions, people and tools across all disciplines of making. Jen has designed an amazing laser-cut wood sculpture that showcases the breadth of maker culture, from engineering and electronics to art and design. This tapestry has been split into nine puzzle pieces, and it's up to you to collect them all and put the puzzle together!
Even if you're not in Austin for SXSW, we want the Tested and maker community to be able to participate in this scavenger hunt. Jen has hidden the nine pieces of this puzzle in locations across Austin, each connected to the themes and disciplines illustrated on the puzzle sections. For each location, you'll have to solve three riddles, and then unscramble selected letters to reveal the name of the place where the puzzle piece is kept. Think hangman, meets crossword puzzle, meets letter jumble! (When you locate a piece, we recommend looking up their business hours before making the trip.)
There are only nine total pieces, and the locations will have instructions for the people who collect them on where and when to bring them together at SXSW. As teams begin uncovering the locations and retrieving the puzzle pieces, we'll be tweeting and updating this page with the solutions. And once the puzzle comes together this Tuesday evening, we'll unlock the laser cutter designs for this beautiful art piece for you to make your own or remix the design.
The clues for the nine puzzle locations are below, and you can also download them here to print out! Collaborate with other people working to find these puzzle pieces in the comments section below or on social media using the hashtags #makerpuzzle and #sxsw2017. Good luck!
Here's a simple and timely project for your laser cutter: a custom Nintendo Switch stand that holds it at more usable angle than the built-in kickstand and allows USB-C port access for charging. Frank sketches out the design and puts it together using threaded rod. Download the SVG file here!
Boeing recently unveiled the suit that astronauts will be wearing when they ride their upcoming Starliner capsule to the International Space Station (ISS). Officially called the Starliner Ascent and Entry Suit, it also answers to "Starliner spacesuit". Aside from its bold "Boeing blue" color, the Starliner spacesuit has numerous features worth noting. It is quite different in several ways from any suit that astronauts have ever worn before. These differences reflect an emphasis on mobility and comfort, efforts to blend the suit with its host spacecraft, and the specific emergency scenarios that the suit is designed for.
The most important thing to understand about the Starliner spacesuit is its role an "ascent and entry" suit. As such, it is only designed to be worn during launch and landing of the spacecraft. You won't see astronauts spacewalking in this suit (at least not for long!). The primary function of an ascent and entry suit is to keep the occupant alive if there is a problem inside the crew compartment during launch or landing. The scenarios with the highest probability (though still relatively unlikely) are loss of cabin pressurization or an internal fire.
Before getting to the specifics of the Starliner spacesuit, let's discuss the attributes of ascent/entry suits in generic terms. Previous generations of these suits have been derived from the pressure garments worn by pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft like the U-2 and SR-71. In some cases, the differences were negligible. Whether worn in an airplane or a spacecraft, the job such a suit is to provide its occupant with a tolerable atmospheric pressure, even when the outside pressure conditions are lethal.
A new short and sweet shop tip from Frank Ippolito! Here's a simple way to keep your digital scales clean when you use it to measure out batches of resin.
We go behind the scenes at Weta Workshop to learn how their costume fabricators made the unique silicone "Thermoptic" suit that Scarlett Johansson wears in the upcoming Ghost in the Shell. With Tested's own Danica wearing the costume, Adam Savage chats with costume technician Flo Foxworthy about the design and challenge of making this skin-toned practical suit!
Reddit is special to Simone Giertz (aka "simsalapim"); it marks the start of her journey into robot-building and the reason she now has this "very weird job." So her first AMA was a very big deal for her. We gathered some of our own favorite questions and answers below; to read the full AMA, go here!
sharkuppercut: What do you do with the purposely shitty robots you make after you've done a video with them? Do they get hung in a hall of fame or do they just get tossed in the trashbin?
simsalapim: I keep them! Some of them are packed up and some of them are hanging on the wall in my workshop. I try to not slaughter them for parts because I often bring them to events, TV shows etc.
hush_shush: Can you actually make a better functioning robots or are they really a reflection of your current skill?
simsalapim: To be honest, building shitty robots is surprisingly difficult. I want them to be shitty in a really specific way, so they are not just a shot in the dark. But sure, I'm no Adam Savage...
The Tested office and shop hosts artist Jen Schachter, who's in town from Baltimore to collaborate with Adam on an upcoming secret project. For this project, Jen will be using the laser cutter, vectorizing images using Adobe Illustrator. Jen walks us through her process to give some tips as she begins prototyping!
Adam Savage visits Weta Workshop to get up close with some of the practical props the effects studio made for the upcoming film Ghost in the Shell. Weta Workshop's Richard Taylor shows Adam the mechanical geisha masks and animatronic puppets his team created, and how Weta Workshop used new fabrication and design technologies to make these props possible.