DIY Air Bearings, No Machining Required

Seeing a heavy load slide around on nearly frictionless air bearings is pretty cool; it’s a little like how the puck levitates on an air hockey table. Commercial air bearings are available, o…

Curing CRT Cataracts Freshens Up Retro Roundy TVs

It’s been a long time since the family TV has had a CRT in it, and even longer since that it was using what was basically an overgrown oscilloscope tube. But “roundies” were once …

Steel Reinforcement Toughens Cracked Vintage Knobs

Nothing can ruin a restoration project faster than broken knobs. Sure, that old “boat anchor” ham rig will work just fine with some modern knobs, but few and far between are the vintage…

Laser Fault Injection, Now With Optional Decapping

Whether the goal is reverse engineering, black hat exploitation, or just simple curiosity, getting inside the packages that protect integrated circuits has long been the Holy Grail of hacking. It i…

Repairing A Gear With A Candle (and Some Epoxy)

You have a broken gear you need to fix, but there’s no equivalent part available. That’s the issue [Well Done Tips] faced with a plastic gear from a lawnmower. While we’d be tempt…

Sandpaper Alternatives For 3D Prints

A finished 3D print, especially plastic deposition types, often have imperfections in them from the process of laying down each layer of material and from the printer itself. For small batches or o…

The Tale Of Two Broken Flukes

Some repairs happen as if by pure luck, and [Sebastian] shows us one such repair on Hackaday.io. He found two Fluke 175 meters being sold on eBay, with one having a mere beeper issue, and another h…

Utility Mat Turns Waste Epoxy Into Useful Tools

Epoxy is a great and useful material typically prepared by mixing two components together. But often we find ourselves mixing too much epoxy for the job at hand, and we end up with some waste left …

Domesticating Plasma With A Gorgeous Live Edge Table

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we don’t often cover woodworking projects here. It’s not because we aren’t impressed with the skill…

Extreme Espresso, Part 2: An Inductive Water Level Sensor

[Mark Smith] must really, really like his coffee, at least judging by how much effort he’s put into tricking out his espresso machine. This inductive water tank sensor is part of a series of …

PCB Microsurgery Puts The Bodges Inside The Board

We all make mistakes, and there’s no shame in having to bodge a printed circuit board to fix a mistake. Most of us are content with cutting a trace or two with an Xacto or adding a bit of jum…

The Ins And Outs Of Casting Lenses From Epoxy

If you need a lens for a project, chances are pretty good that you pick up a catalog or look up an optics vendor online and just order something. Practical, no doubt, but pretty unsporting, especia…

Flat Transformer Gives This PCB Tesla Coil Some Kick

Arguably, the most tedious part of any Tesla coil build is winding the transformer. Getting that fine wire wound onto a suitable form, making everything neat, and making sure it’s electricall…