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…

Custom Pneumatic Cylinders Lock This Monitor Arm In Place

Few consumer-grade PCs are what you’d categorize as built to last. Most office-grade machines are as likely as not to give up the ghost after ingesting a few too many dust bunnies, and the av…

Tentacle Robot Wants To Hold You Gently

Human hands are remarkable pieces of machinery, so it’s no wonder many robots are designed after their creators. The amount of computation required to properly attenuate the grip strength and…

Lessons Learned From A High-Voltage Power Supply

When you set out to build a 60,000-volt power supply and find out that it “only” delivers a measly 50,000 volts, you naturally have to dive in and see where things can be improved. And …

DIY Pneumatic Actuator Does Great In Action

Pneumatic actuators can be powerful and fast, making them very useful for all kinds of mechanical jobs. [Michael Rechtin] decided that while he could buy them off-the-shelf, he preferred to see if …

Gas-Powered Fly Swatter Slightly Over-Engineered

Any good flyswatter ought to be able to break through a hefty piece of wood. At least, that is how [Finn] explains the design philosophy behind this enormous, overpowered flyswatter. Although we do…

Imagining A Dune-accurate Fremen Thumper

Never underestimate the power of fandom to obsess over the smallest details of its chosen canon. We say that with all due respect, of course, as some of the builds that result are really cool, like…

Powering A Backyard Railway With Compressed Air

When you’ve gone to the trouble of building your own backyard railway, chances are pretty good that at some point, you’re going to want to add a locomotive of some sort. After all, nobo…

Tiny Pneumatic Tool Made From A Single(-ish) Bolt

We’ve noticed a couple of things about the “Widget from a Single Bolt” genre of metalworking videos. The first thing is that almost all of them need to use a freakishly large bolt…

Impressive Hack Turns Bolt Into Pneumatic Engraver

Did you ever see one of those videos that causes you to look at an everyday object in a new light? This is one of those videos (embedded below). And fortunately for us, there’s a write-up to …