Pallets, Pallets, Pallets. You have to love them! How to build an outdoor play kitchen for the kids using old pallets and recycled / reclaimed wood. I came up with the idea after seeing how my young son loved playing with the one at childcare. Pallet projects and Pallet Ideas are never far from my mind so l couldn't wait to get stuck into building my play kitchen.
Why can't Thanksgiving be a celebration of fireworks, too? This year, it can be with an innocent looking pumpkin pie that erupts an insane fountain of flames and fire! In fact, the pie filling is actually a flammable mixture of sugar and potassium nitrate, which was made using the same process as my DIY smoke flares with fuses.
Sometimes the best place to hide something is where people least expect it, so in this project, we're making a super secret safe that only you'll know about.
Photographers have been using the Pepper's Ghost Illusion for over a century to play up the level of creepiness in their photos. Many of the pictures that claim to be real "sightings" use this technique to project a ghostly figure into the background of their images. Today, it's still used in theatre, "scary" rides at amusement parks, and haunted houses all over the world, which makes it a great photography trick for Halloween time. As shown in the tutorial below by Make's Jason Poel Smith, t...
This summer's going to be a hot one, so skip the water pistol this year and break out the big guns! In this project, I'll be showing you how to build a water balloon shotgun—a high-powered water balloon launcher that's capable of firing 17 water balloons at the same time!
If you're studying human anatomy (or have ever visited a doctor's office), you're no doubt familiar with those plastic anatomical models with removable pieces meant to teach the different parts of the body. Before those, there were illustrated pop-up books. If you need to know the difference between the latissimus dorsi and the multifidus, you're probably better off sticking with your textbook diagrams. But if you prefer a more artful approach (and have a lot of time one your hands), this pap...
Mixing water and electricity is extremely risky and potentially lethal, yet that's exactly what I did with the Scariac. In its simplest form, the Scariac is just a glorified version of two wires in a bucket of water, but it's actually one of the cheapest power controllers you can make.
A lot of my hacks use salvaged parts from an old microwave, with the microwave oven transformer (MOT) being the most useful component.
The fill tool will allow you to alter the appearance of objects in your web design document and can be very useful for marketing purposes. The fill tool can be used to give objects one solid color for simple designs.
Antique car collecting and restoration is a very popular hobby practiced by many around the world. A quick drive through my town turns up with a handful of classic cars parked in their respective driveways, some in pristine condition, and others not-so-much. While some people end up eventually fixing up their classics, many also do not. Some cars end up rotting away, left to be either salvaged or sold off in pieces—mostly due to time consumption and excessive costs.
For this project, I sacrificed some of my kids' clothes and a can of tuna to make some high-quality fire starter! Here's how to make a great batch of char cloth to add to your emergency survival kit.
If you can think of a piece of junk, someone has probably found a way to turn it into a lamp. Granted, sometimes the result is more functional than beautiful, but DIY lighting is probably one of the most versatile projects you can take on.
As our society and population grows, more developments such as housing and restaurants are built. While this is beneficial for us, it's not so great for the environment and the animals that occupy it. Some of the victims of our prosperity have been the birds, forced from their natural habitats.
Polaroid photographs have a charming old-fashioned feel to them, evoking nostalgic memories of past days. My younger sister used to carry her Polaroid camera everywhere she went, transforming even the most trite moments into something wonderful.
If you've got old game consoles lying around and aren't sure what to do with them, there's no shortage of projects you can undertake. From turning a Game Boy and Wii Remote into an Android phone gamepad to combining a GameCube and N64 to make a hybrid console, there's something for everyone.
Sharing screens is a great way to showcase projects, photos, or videos without having to download and upload those files on the other devices. This is made easy with AllSharePlus. You can download the AllSharePlay application for your Samsung Galaxy S III or Tab 2 right here. If you would like to download it for sharing on your laptop, you can visit the Samsung website. For now, the desktop app is only compatible with Windows XP or Windows 7 and the devices shown above. Nevertheless, it is gr...
These three videos will show you how to build a rustic, distressed kitchen table. I'll be walking you through the process of selecting some recycled timber from a junk pile, and with a little care and some simple joinery techniques, transform that waste timber into a distressed timber kitchen or dining table. In fact, you could use the table for whatever you wanted really.
Doorbells are useful and all, but most of them are boring as hell. They use the same old generic sounds to let you know when guests have arrived, as demonstrated below.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past five months, you're more than likely acquainted with PSY and his insanely popular mega hit "Gangnam Style."
It's tough out there on the battlefield, especially when your stuck in the trenches and your comrades are dropping like flies. There's no hope. At least, until the next airsoft battle.
There are plenty of tank robots out there, but how many of them can recognize 3D objects and map their environment? Tanky, the tracked mobile robot, can do all that and more while rolling around on his bicycle chain treads. Created as a Master's thesis project, Tanky is made almost entirely of parts you can find at your local hardware store. It was built in two "layers" with the motors, electronics, and batteries on bottom and the processing unit, a laptop, on top. The motors came from cordle...
You can do a lot with water guns. Have trouble waking up? Make a water gun alarm clock that (almost) no one could sleep through. Prefer real ammo? Turn your water gun into an airsoft BB gun. And if you don't have one, you can even make your own.
Here's a way you can turn a mousetrap into a fun little handgun that shoots up to 40 feet! This is a great project because it can be made with simple materials, very basic tools, and in just a few minutes!
Believe it or not, an ammo box can still be of use to you once its rounds are gone. You can use it for storage, as a toolbox, or possibly even as a Faraday cage. But if you want to use it as more than just a container, why not turn it into a portable set of speakers that you can take with you anywhere? The ammo can speaker pictured above was made by Instructables user Dustin White. He started with an empty .50 cal box, though you could probably even use thinner 5.56 or 7.62 mm cans. He remove...
For this project, I decided to rip apart a microwave I found in my neighbor's garbage can to see what was inside. With permission, of course! True story!
Dried out markers are the worst. They take up space, and for some reason, even though they're totally useless, most of us have at least a few lying around just for the sake of not throwing them out. Luckily, Julie Finn over at Crafting a Green World has come up with a way to repurpose them into alcohol ink, a versatile type of ink that can be used on non-porous materials like plastic, glass, and metal. This is truly a tutorial for the pack rat in all of us. First, a little primer on what you ...
Looking to transmit some super-secret audio communications to your other spy buddies? A laser is the perfect tool for getting your sounds heard from a small distance—without anyone intercepting them— even if it's just a cover of your favorite pop song. A laser audio transmitter uses light rather than radio waves to transmit sound. This is a much more secure way to send audio communications because the laser is a focused beam of light, whereas radio waves are not controlled, so they can be pic...
You can take some absolutely gorgeous photos using the natural reflection that appears in people's and animals' eyes. With the right angle and lighting, you can even see a detailed picture of what the subject was looking at when the photo was taken. Photo by Martin Cathrae
For his thesis at Design Academy Eindhoven, artist/designer Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen created this incredible chair using tubular steel cut into thin rings. How did he get them to stay that way? He burned them. His project is called Engineering Temporality, and the inspiration came from his grandmother whose Alzheimer's disease is deteriorating her health and memories. Once he cut the rings, he laid them over an existing chair, only partially covering it. The fire acted as a varnish, creati...
Back in 2008, media artist Kyle McDonald created a 3D interface that could track movement, which he turned into a virtual Tic-tac-toe game.
If you're a steampunk enthusiast looking to give your bathroom an extra kick, this just might be the project for you. This stylish and functional "vintage" toothbrush timer knows when you've grabbed your toothbrush, and will visually count down two minutes before alerting you when you've brushed long enough. All you'll need to put one together yourself is a microcontroller (the designer used a ATmega328p), a weight sensor, light bulbs, brass cups and a tray, an alarm clock's chime, and some w...
I've never really liked to type on a flat or low keyboard. Even the small flip-up stands underneath most keyboards were not good enough for me, as those little legs aren't usually more than 2 or 3 centimeters high. I'd like a minimum of 5 cm, so I decided to make this keyboard base for myself. Aside from giving me the right height and angle, this DIY keyboard base also features LEDs that light up my monitor, the table, and gives a nice background to my desktop. It's even got a built-in stand ...
Playing Angry Birds on a computer just got a lot more interesting. Design students Andrew Spitz and Hideaki Matsui made this awesome slingshot controller for one of their classes at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.
Do you have two dollars and a water bottle? Then you can put together this simple but awesome solar-powered lantern that will provide more than enough light to read by at night.
Remember those old vinyl records? Remember jumping on the 8-track bandwagon? Switching over to cassette tapes? How much money you spent converting your music collection to compact discs? To MP3s?
Expert homemaker and educator Karen Weisman teaches how to do fun science projects for children right at home. She teaches how to make ooze, foam, film canister rockets, flubber, virtual vomit, melting witches, rubber bones, and how to do water magic. Also, Karen explains the ingredients necessary for each project and the scientific importance of each project. These videos are fun, educational, and free, so start having fun while learning today!
Systm is the Do It Yourself show designed for the common geek who wants to quickly and easily learn how to dive into the latest and hottest tech projects. We will help you avoid pitfalls and get your project up and running fast. Search Systm on WonderHowTo for more DIY episodes from this Revision3 show.
At first, it seemed like a clever art installation housed on the web, but now we're not so sure... the Newstweek hack may indeed be legit.
In this video, we learn how to make silly putty from scratch. You will first need to take some flour and mix it with warm water in a small plastic container. After you mix this together and it turns into a putty type of shape, you will then add in some food coloring to the container as well. Add in some borax to this and continue to mix until it's completely finished mixing together. When done, you will be able to play with this and make other colors to mix together. This is a great project f...
This video explains how to burn DVDs that will play on a standard DVD player in Windows. The programs needed to complete this project include IMG Burn and DeVeDe which has been modeled for Windows. The final burn product created with this program will allow the DVDs to play on computers and actual DVD players. The first step is to hit open to select the file you wish to burn. You must then select burn ISO or Bin file in IMG Burn or DeVeDE. You can then select a title for your burned disk leav...
