Explore technology, science, and art.
A while back, my wife ask me to make some dog dish risers for our Boston Terriers. I’d just gotten my Craigslist laser cutter running and had recently found a box-drawing extension for Inkscape, so I thought I’d give it a try. I did some research and figured out that for our dogs, I needed …
It’s been two years since we first decided to start using banker’s boxes for storage at OMG. The idea has worked out great, and that original storage shelf is still going strong and sees constant use, but we filled it almost immediately. We had originally planned on making several of those shelving units, but they’re …
This is a short collection of videos that provide a showcase for some of the things that happened at Omaha Maker Group this winter. It shows a sample of the structured (the annual graham cracker house contest) and unstructured (trying to destabilize a quadcopter with compressed air) activities that occurred.
In order to test out the new lids for our kiln, we fired it up again this month and melted some more metal. This time it was aluminum and brass scraps. After burning off the impurities we poured the ingots and prepared molds for an art project. The goal, which you see in the title …
Earlier this year we put together a kiln to melt some aluminum and the lid we made was good enough, but not perfect. It was made of soft refractory bricks, held to a metal plate with fireplace adhesive. The adhesive failed so this time we decided to cast a lid in refractory cement. This video …
During one of our Tuesday evening meetings we experimented with creating plasma. How do you make plasma? Well, usually air insulates electric charges, so it requires high voltage to break apart the molecules. In a partial vacuum, however, this breakdown potential may decrease enough that two uninsulated surfaces with different potentials might induce the electrical …
This video details the process we completed in order to cast a hammer from aluminum, from making the kiln through making our own foundry tools, testing, and finally pouring in our handmade cast. The product would be a hammer that would not produce sparks if dropped on concrete, but the goal of the project was …
OMG has had a kiln made of high quality refractory brick for a while now but recently Kevin led an effort to rekindle it. After a couple weeks of preparation we spent Saturday morning making last minute adjustments and then fired it up. In all, it only took a half hour or so to turn …
I damaged a CD4093BE and instead of throwing it away I decided to satisfy my curiosity regarding its guts. I used Omaha Maker Group’s belt sander to grind away the top layer of material and it revealed a tiny chip embedded within. The slightly orangey color on the right side is where I sanded away …
