David Knaack

Recently I discovered that my doorbell has become unreliable. The UPS guy never wants to wait around, and sometimes he takes the packages with him, so I had to do something about this problem. I picked up a new bell at the hardware store for a couple b…

I had a broken micro RC car that used a gearbox with a tiny potentiometer on it for controlling the steering angle. I thought it would be interesting to replace the little potentiometer with a regular sized version so I could set the position either ma…

This weekend some friends and I spent a few hours working on binding some books. We started with the paper from some drawing pads which we folded in half in sets of 4 to 6 to form signatures. We stacked between 5 and 8 of the signatures and stitched bo…

Did a quick zinc casting of a small knight figure. This was a sand casting demo for some friends who are interested in the skill. I was surprised that the shaft of the mace came out, since it is only about 2mm in diameter.The casting ended up with a po…

A few years ago I ran across composer Alvin Lucier’s work “I Am Sitting in a Room”.I thought that this was pretty cool, though excessively long. I’ve thought that it would be interesting to reproduce it, just for fun. Since the Makery is in a large mul…

I and a couple guys from the Omaha Maker Group got together all the tools for doing some aluminum casting this morning. We’re going to do a forge day with the group at some point, and we wanted to make sure my burner, the furnace body, and the crucible…

One of the Omaha Maker Group’s generous members donated some robot arms a while back. A couple of them had some mechanical issues, and we’ve stripped those for parts. Some of the remaining arms are reserved to possibly share with some other groups. Thi…

For the sand casting demo for the Omaha Maker Group, I picked up some beads at Hobby Lobby to use as patterns. I thought that since these were convex they would make for an easier demo than the glass dish I used in my first attempt. These turned out to…

I picked up some drill rod today at the local Fastenal store and put the X axis together.We used smooth rods out of various printers and a scanner for the other axes, but we didn’t have any rods long enough for the X axis, which needed rods of at least…