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homemade knife: small fixed blade
I’ve always wanted to make custom knives. When I finally deemed my circular saw blade too dull to use, it seemed like a great opportunity. The steel used in saw blades usually has high enough carbon content to be hardened, so hang on to them! (or mail to me :D). I traced my blade pattern […]
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Fatigue: a study of flexures in a scooter
Introducing, Fatigue, my preemptively-named flexure-based scooter. You can see how a flexure is perfect for the rear brake, which has quite limited travel. Luckily, it also doesn’t see to many extreme forces. It is made from polycarbonate, about 0.1″ thick. The pivot for the front fork however, needs to achieve relatively high deflection (to improve […]
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wooden climbing holds and hang board
Climbing is fun, so is making climbing holds. Its also a good way to make good use of scrap wood. Here’s one with a finger pocket. Because of its shape, there’s no material for the forstner bit to center on, so I cut a sacrificial piece to help the bit center until it cut deep […]
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bamboo bike Part 5: final sanding/finishing and assembly
In hindsight, I definitely applied too many separate layers than was necessary. This also meant that I sanded more than was necessary, and used more epoxy than was necessary. Anyhow, at last I arrived at the last layer: Although I always have random bike parts, I rarely have a full (compatible) set. I was very […]
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bamboo bike Part 4: brake bridge and water bottle holder
Besides the lugs, the other metal bits on this frame are the brake bridge and the screw bosses for the water bottle holder. For the brake bridge I started with some 1/2″ thick aluminum plate. I sketched a shape on cardboard, traced that onto the metal, and cut it out roughly with a bandsaw. The […]
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bamboo bike Part 3: lugs
With all the tubes tacked in place on the jig, I could start wrapping the lugs. This is a crazy messy business, so I wrapped everything besides the lugs in tape and plastic to minimize the epoxy clean up later. Here’s the frame with the first layer of epoxy on it: Definitely not ready to […]
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bamboo bike Part 2: fitting the tubes
After building the jig that holds the lugs in place, it was time to fit the bamboo poles together. I found that Orchard Supply Hardware was the easiest place to get bamboo (neither Home Depot or Lowe’s near me had it). You can definitely order bamboo online, but I found OSH to be much cheaper, […]
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bamboo bike Part 1: Frame-building Jig
Almost 9 months ago I built a frame jig for a bamboo bike. Between work and life, I didn’t actually finish the bike until Thansgiving, and I’m only getting around to blogging about it now. Here’s the finished bike: I’ve wanted to build a bamboo bike for a long time. More than a year ago, […]
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micro drill press
Hence concludes the many months where I couldn’t get my act together to post about my projects!! Here is a small one that I did a few weeks ago on my last visit to MIT. I spotted the chunk of aluminum (that makes up the base of this drill press) in a scrap bin. The […]
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Treescooter (Part 2/2)
I meant to update part 2 forever ago…but here it is now! Last time I finished rambling about the deck and the fork. After that I started working on the folding and locking mechanism: First I wanted to give the base of the handlebars more material so that I could make a fairly beefy pivot […]