Daily DIY

I’m unemployed this Christmas. So the mall is out. Online shopping? Out.



I’ve always wanted to make a t-shirt mash-up so this gave me perfect motivation. And home-made Christmas gifts? You can’t beat that.



I took a boy T from the good ‘ol Seattle Goodwill Outlet and an old tank I’ve worn to the bone; slap on one of my bro’s old Boy Scout patches and *wow* - awesome new T for a boy I have a crush on.



Needed: t-shirts, patch(es), scissors and sewing machine or needle and thread for the patient and brave of fingers, and of course, a bit of creativity.



Cost? Less than a dollar!


By: lilo

I am very cheap by nature,

so when i decided to start working on the house, i had decided to make it ac inexpensive as possible, Free is even better.

well, we have this house that was built in 1957 and the heater was bad, the grade was bad, the doors, windows and the lack of insulation in the ceiling made it vary cold in the winter and vary hot in the summer, I had decided that i need to fix the problems, and one of those projects involved replacing the windows. Well there seems to be a lot of people here where i live that like to tear down old homes and build McMansions worth millions of dollars, in the process the previous house gets mowed down, you can contact the owners and they will let you take whatever you want, (the more stuff going the land fill is equal to more money that needs to be spent.) regardless, it means that you can get stuff for free.

this instance i knew the owner and he had just replaced the windows 2 years ago, and said i could have the windows. So i went over with a screwdriver and a crowbar and proceeded to remove all of the windows. next thing i knew, i had eight relatively new windows.

and here is how i installed them in my house, maybe this will help out some one.



here is one of the windows i replaced, i did the same process for all of the windows




By: sabianq

OK Makers, you asked and we’re delivering - we’re working all weekend on the MAKE: warranty voider Leatherman pocket tools (electronics and plier versions) - we have stock again, we are laser etching them up right now! So— get’em while they’re hot, literally.

Go go go!

• MAKE: Warranty Voider - Leatherman “Squirt” E4 (electronics version) - Link.
• MAKE: Warranty Voider - Leatherman “Squirt” P4 (plier version) - Link.

Here are some action shots.

More photos here - Link.

And last up, a digital camera -inside- the laser bed, the video is fun to watch.

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This year I kind of wanted to get my son something that was cool. The problem is that I don’t want him to get the full impact all at once.



Have you ever read the ingredients in this stuff…yikes! Anyway, I will attempt to show you what I have done after I have done it. I started to take pictures midway.



You will need the following:



Box of cereal

iPod Nano

A knife

Paste or rubber cement

a little computer knowledge


By: luckymonkeygarage

Use steel wool to rough up a plast case leaving a design shiny.



I have a camera case that had a pretty glossy finish. That’s not really my style, so I wanted to roughen it up a bit(or pre-age it). I think some sort of sandblaster would have worked well to do this, but I didn’t really try to get a hold of one of those.



I also had the idea to mask of a portion of the plastic to keep a design in there. I am in no way good at freeform drawing, so I went with the old standby(and somewhat clichéd) images of 80s video game characters. I had no clue how it would turn out, so this is very much an experiment in the actual probject, as well as the instructable(this is my first try at one)


By: sarCastro

Wow, Ben Heck is busy - here are a couple project he kicked out this weekend…

Design a 2D robo-hand - I’m going to download the files and pop them in the laser tonight (hopefully!)…

For today’s How-To we’re going to go through the process of designing a somewhat complex item that can be cut with a standard 3 axis homebuilt CNC machine: a jointed “robotic hand”. This requires several design methods drawn in multiple views, which will demostrate many of the techniques that are useful in preparing items for CNC cutting. At the very least it’s a good primer for vector artwork in general, if you’ve ever been curious about it. So let’s take a look at what’s involved in prepping our CNC robot factory - Link.

For many years an Atari 800 laptop was my “dream portable”. Then after I built it I had no more worlds to conquer, so to speak. Well, I do, my custom pinball machine, but I digress. Anyway, earlier this year I had a request to build another Atari 800 laptop so I decided to have another whack at it. With less woodgrain this time, and hopefully some new features. I also wanted to redo the keyboard design. Thanks technick29! - Link.

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Alan from Hackedgadgets alerted me to an ebay auction for a lot of old science and engineering magazines, there was a little time left and with my self-imposed budget of under $20 here’s the auction I won, $9.50! - Link.

The folks who sell them still have some auctions, so now that I picked up some please go get the rest

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I might as well continue a theme of holiday posts by displaying this beauty: a “Christmas tree” made by stringing lights and hanging decorations on a ladder. The most surprising part is really how, well, non-ugly this is. Plus, it’ll make the garbage people happy come January when there’s one less tree to pick up […]

this is a very simple tripod for a camera that you can keep in your pocket. just screw it onto a water bottle, which shouldn’t be a problem since there are coke machines everywhere.


By: origamimavin

Compare 8 different online mapping services with Flash Earth.

Included here are maps from Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, NASA, and OpenLayers. The well-designed interface allows you to easily switch between services; you can sample each one’s particular representation of satellite and aerial imagery and see if it works for you. This is a great way to compare maps quickly. — Wendy Boswell