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.
A Small Sample of OMG Activities Read More »
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
Melting Brass with the OMG Kiln Read More »
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
Casting a New Lid for the Kiln Read More »
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
Generating Plasma at OMG Read More »
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
A Complete Story of Hammer Making Read More »
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
What’s inside an integrated chip? Read More »