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Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#511

Post by whalesalad »

bityard wrote: post #431
whalesalad wrote: post #151

I built a new TV stand for myself. I grew up watching my dad, uncle and grandfather do all kinds of woodworking so it was time to dive in myself. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding and I am really glad with how it turned out. Towards the end I kinda ran out of gas and so I ended up skimping on the legs with some premade ones. I would like to redo the legs at some point. The most rewarding part was creating…

Nice result! I've built a few things out of wood at this point, and my process is largely the same as yours... I start with an idea and a _very_ rough sketch and then just start building. I watch YouTube videos of these people who design every feature and facet in CAD before stepping foot in the workshop and I always wonder where they find the time to do that, and what they do when their plans don't match up with rea…

Thank you! Doing this project definitely gave me a huge appreciation for folks like foureyes on yt who are producing some truly magnificent things.

https://www.youtube.com/@Foureyes.Furniture

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#512

Post by dymk »

I took a Shapeoko 4 Pro CNC, which is a belt driven machine, and redesigned it around ballscrews for the X and Y motion. I reverse engineered the stock machine and rebuilt it in CAD, and made the new parts using the existing Shapeoko. It was made out of 6061-T6 aluminum, and some 3D printed components.

I'm also pretty happy with some of the cutting boards I've made: https://www.longtailwoodcraft.com/images/cube-board.jpg

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#513

Post by Syzygies »

I built a tomato dehydrator (partially dried freezer packs from our garden, estrattu from Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girls). We haven't opened a can of tomatoes in decades. Using four stacks of consumer dehydrator trays was a nightmare so:

A full sheet pan cart, like used in bakeries. Eight full sheet pans, lined with silpat nonstick sheets. A 1500 watt wall heater, a home brewing temperature controller, and a crawl space fan controller that looks like it belongs in a stereo stack. Build a plywood box around the whole thing. I had to swap in a less sensitive thermal cutoff to keep the heater from shutting off. Now we can process 60 lbs of tomatoes at a go.

There was a lot to figure out, no equations to help guess scale. I should really document this on a web site, the plans out there are very sketchy and wouldn't accommodate our scale.

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#515

Post by ansible »

(Well, I had a lot of help from my dad...)

A 3-D chess board. No, not one of those lame ones that you can put on your desk with 3 boards. And no, not like the one on Star Trek either.

It was a full cube (8 x 8 x 8). Major pieces on boards 1 and 8, pawns on 2 and 7. The moves for the pieces project to three dimensions in a fairly straight-forward manner. Pawns can only queen on the farthest board from their start, on the farthest row.

The whole thing stood five feet tall, and you were constantly squatting to see what was going on across the boards.

I even once convinced a friend to play a game with me. Once.

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#516

Post by eps »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #381
ben7799 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically, but Gibson made these and it was a real failure in the market to the point they even destroyed a lot of the stock of guitars they couldn't sell. It might raise from the dead with a non-traditional guitar design like a headless guitar where the mass of the automatic tuners could be hidden inside the guitar body.

Electronic self-tuning machines are still a thing, its just returned to totally aftermarket. Its just too niche and really mostly useful if you use a lot of alternate tunings in a set and can't bring multiple guitars.

Lots of music shops use them too.

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#518

Post by TT-392 »

LesZedCB wrote: post #168
TT-392 wrote: post #149

One of my favorites is an RC boat made out of metal. It turns out that you can get 0.3mm thick, tin plated steel, cut it with scissors, bend it, and solder it together with a normal soldering iron. Another other one would be a split keyboard, for which I designed and built everything (case, pcb, plate, software) from scratch.

I used to make RC planes and quads, it was super fun, and there's a huge community of foam board planes which are pretty fun and easy. which style keeb did you make? :D

I tried to get into RC planes, but not living near any places where flying is even allowed really ruined those plans.

As for the keyboard, it is a split arisu style keyboard: https://fosstodon.org/@TT_392/109920314230277590

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#519

Post by jmatthews »

swighton wrote: post #361

I made a baseball bat that uses explosives to add a bunch of energy to your swing and hit a baseball really far. It uses the explosive blanks normally used to shoot nails into concrete (e.g. ramset). It worked way better than I expected, didn't have a kick, and turned out to be just a really neat thing to look at while sipping a frosty beverage. I also made a video about it if you're interested: https://youtu.be/Puo6…

Fan of the channel.

Re: Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

#520

Post by Wistar »

89vision wrote: post #323
kmm wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're in two gists here: https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/781f0137b361b51224dcab7... https://gist.github.com/kaspermeerts/b6f158b1278de307e48a200... I just hacked it together, but I do think it's not unreadable code

> but I do think it's not unreadable code hopefully your boolean conditionals are easier to read than that

Hah!
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