Chemical Materials Search Results

How To: Solder copper pipes for plumbing

Soldering copper pipes is a basic plumbing skill that once mastered will enable you to tackle many DIY home repair and home improvement projects - for instance, replacing copper water lines or installing a new spigot. It can be as much an art as it is a science, thus the more you get the "feel for it," the faster and easier it gets.

How to Be Your Own SpaceX: Design, Build & Test Liquid-Fueled Rocket Engines

Move over NASA— SpaceX is taking over. Well, not really. But today, the privately funded spacecraft company broke all expectations when their Dragon capsule fell to a soft landing in the Pacific Ocean, completing an undoubtedly successful demo flight of nearly two full trips around Earth. It was the first re-entry of a commercial spacecraft ever, bringing commercial space transportation closer to reality.

How To: Build & Hide a Campfire from Your Enemies — The Dakota Fire Pit

Fire.  It’s everywhere— always has been.  From the Ordovician Period where the first fossil record of fire appears to the present day everyday uses of the Holocene.  Today, we abundantly create flames (intentionally or unintentionally) in power plants, extractive metallurgy, incendiary bombs, combustion engines, controlled burns, wildfires, fireplaces, campfires, grills, candles, gas stoves and ovens, matches, cigarettes, and the list goes on... Yet with our societies' prodigal use of fire, t...

News: Outined for Success!

The Workshop this weekend went of without a hitch! Except that it didn't happen until later at night, The workshop went exceptionally well. Lots of people came out to build in this weeks workshop and here's some nice pictures to help tell the tale!

How To: Use Google Voice to Prank Your Friends on April Fool's Day

In this article, I'll show you how to prank your friends on April Fool's Day with the very popular Google Voice, a computer to land/mobile calling feature. Basically, Google allows you to play whatever you like through the microphone port on your computer, and play it right through to your victim's phone. Whether it's Rick Astley ("Never Gonna Give You Up") or a text-to-speech application, general hilarity always follows.

How To: Make an Exploding Ashtray Prank for April Fool's Day

The exploding ashtray prank was once fairly commonplace long before the Internet was born. Using flash cotton to create a startling explosion, this prank is certainly effective at getting a reaction. Flash cotton is a staple of many magic acts; used for its ability to create a brilliant flash of fire without causing a burn to the skin.

How To: Make a Hairspray-Fueled PVC Rocket Cannon

This week, I've been working on a project that sort of takes a spin off an old-style potato gun. Using PVC pipe and the rapid combustion of hairspray, we can launch a rocket hundreds of feet into the sky. As usual for my projects, I tried to use only materials and parts that are commonly available. I even give two different forms of ignition, in case one method ends up being hard to come by. The following video will explain the project further: The launcher can be reloaded and fired repeatedl...

How To: Make a BB Machine Gun from a Soda Bottle

In a previous article, I showed how to make a powerful airsoft BB machine gun with a portable air supply using about $50 worth of PVC and air fittings. For this project, I have simplified the design to make a machine gun out of only 4 parts totaling about $15 that runs directly off of an air compressor.

News: Math Craft Inspiration of the Week: The Kinetic Wave Sculptures of Reuben Margolin

Reuben Margolin builds large scale kinetic sculptures based off of mechanical waves. Some of his sculptures contain hundreds of pulleys all working in harmony with each other to create sinusoidal waves and their resulting interference patterns. He designs them all on paper and does all of the complicated trigonometric calculations by hand. Everything is mechanical; there are no electronic controllers.

News: What Is Technology?

What is Technology? Technology is all around us. Some technology we take for granted while other technology we allow ourselves to be amazed and baffled by. Technology is more than modern technology companies like Cisco Systems, IBM, and Google.

News: Mechanical Sculpture Spits Out 441 Perfectly Sphered Water Droplets

Beauty is a fine line between art and science for Pe Lang, a Swiss sculptor living and working in both Berlin and Zurich. The autodidact artist specializes in graceful, hand-built kinetic sculptures made of magnetic, electrical and mechanical devices, all of which are elegant and completely mesmerizing. "Positioning Systems - Falling Objects" is one of his newest contraptions, which feels like a mix of home waterfall fountains, mechanical metronomes and a busy manufacturing plant.

How To: How Area 51 Fooled the Soviets with Fake Spy Planes

Area 51 is the most secretive military base in the United States, a base that U.S. government officials to this day still barely acknowledge because of its top secret development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. But a slew of Cold War-era documents have finally been declassified, and National Geographic has discovered a rather low-tech method the military used to hide its high-tech prototypes.

Start Your Day Off Right: Beautiful Oscar Nominated Short "The Lost Thing"

The Lost Thing is a lovely short written by Shaun Tan and co-directed by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann (executive producer of the fantastic doc My Kid Could Paint That). Based on the award-winning children’s book of the same title (also by Tan), the piece was created over a span of eight years(!) using a mix of CGI and 2D handpainted elements. Tan, whose background is in painting, spent much of the duration "carefully building, texturing and lighting of digitial elements to create a unique aestheti...

News: Building a Bonafide Solar Death Ray Sounds Too Easy

Eric Jacqmain is one smart cookie. Borrowing from the same principles of Archimedes’ mythological death ray, the Indiana teenager used an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish and about 5,800 3/8" mirror tiles to create a solar weapon with the intensity of 5000x normal daylight. The powerful weapon can "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant."