Adventures in DIY

Being a combination of crafty and cheap, DIY projects are just our thing. Projects range from hardware hacking to furniture making.

Creating a Duct Tape Chair

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I purchased a dome chair from a big box store last year and it didn’t hold up very well.  The chair part ripped and fell of the frame.  Since the frame was still left intact, I didn’t want to throw it away -so I reused it to make a new chair.  Using duct tape (the best duct tape of all – Nashua 357), I created a new frame for the chair.  This project was quick, cheap, and easy; it used less than $10 in materials and only an hour of my time.  The result is a chair that is much sturdier than the original I purchased. 

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Overhanging Desk Work Light

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The SheekGeek office doesn’t have very good lighting and because of this, working on things at my work desk is always tough.  I’ve tried a lot of different solutions to this problem such as the lighted helping hands set-up, sitting a small fluorescent light on top of my parts organizer, and even hanging the lamp from a couple of the bins on the top row of the parts organizer.  None of these provided a good solution.  The fluorescent lamp was rather blinding, and with every solution, my hands cast shadows on what I’m working on.  This lead me to finally come up with a great working solution to my problem that casts no shadows.

A couple of years ago when I wrote for Hackaday I did an article about the Hacker’s Soldering Station. Since then, that station became too bulky and impractical for my office.  I needed something that was easier to move, or possibly break down to take up less space.  I looked around at what I had on hand and slapped together this quick fix that is the perfect solution for my needs.

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Create an Instrument – Easier than Lemon Pie

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After baking a cheesecake, my husband cut off the top to the lemon juice container.  It turns out that the resulting plastic container creates the perfect jug-like instrument.  Because it is plastic you can easily squeeze the “lemon” to create different sounds.  Just like a real jug instrument, you can also add water to make different notes.  I wonder if you can add holes to create a ocarina-like instrument?  Perhaps that will be another post…

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Custom PVC Banner Holder for about $15

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For a while now, we have been doing our museum shows, Geekfests, and Makerfaires. At each event, we always have a problem displaying our 8 foot SheekGeek.com banner. For years we’ve basically taped the banner to the front of our table but no one can really see it, especially when we get busy and there are several layers of people in front of the table. In recent event we’ve been taping it behind the table on a wall. This doesn’t always work because we aren’t always in front of a wall. When we do luck out and get a wall behind us, we can’t always use it to tape up the banner. Looking for a portable solution to hold the banner behind us at a table, we found a few designs for a PVC banner holder.

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How to Make a New Swarm of Solderless WASP Kits

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Recently, we noticed our stock of WASP and WASP Solderless kits were running a bit low. Just in time for the World Maker Faire (be sure to stop by and say “hello”), we thought you might be interested in seeing what goes into making a new swarm of WASPs. This article is complete with lots of pictures showing every step.

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