How To: Make your own mylar balloon

Mylar balloons are the best party favors. They are big and shiny and last longer than normal latex balloons. In this tutorial, learn how to make a mylar balloon at home, from scratch. Stop spending so much money at the party store, and next time you have a big event, make your own! Not only will you save money, but it will give your party a cool personal touch.

How To: Make a rubber band powered car with CD wheels

In this video tutorial, viewers learn how to make a toy car with CD wheels. The materials required for this task are: 2 thread spools, long piece of thing wood, 4 CD's, 2 screws, 2 washers and 2 bolts. Begin by drilling a hole in the spools and 2 holes in the wood. Then place a washer on the screw. Now place the CD on the washer. Then add another washer and secure it by screwing on a bolt. Now put the wheel through the first board of wood. Then put it through the spool and other wood board. N...

How To: Make an Internally Lit Ice Sculpture with LED Lights

Why not make the best of an icy cold winter day and make something even cooler? In this tutorial, you will learn how to make a natural ice sculpture in your yard and light it up with LED lights for a cool, nighttime effect. You will definitely have the best house on the block once you start lighting up your ice, so check this video out and get started! This project is super quick and cheap to create, too!

How To: Make a really good paper airplane

This video shows you how to make a very good paper airplane, that will fly in the air for about 10 seconds before it falls. Start by folding your paper in half length-wise, and then at one end fold triangles from the corners into the middle. Then flip your paper over, and fold the same corners in again, so that your paper looks like a taller point. Take the last 3 inches of the point and bend it into the middle of the paper, creating an X out of the folds. Then fold it all in half so that you...

How To: Make a nut and bolt keychain

Project 4 of the Popular Science 5 Minute Projects with Craftsmen Tools is a Nut-and-Bolt Keychain. Downsize your pocket cargo with a custom-fit keychain. Editor Sean Captain ditches the ring and uses more tool than necessary to trim a small bolt to just the right size for his set of keys. (For a slightly different take on the project, see the site that inspired us: carlitoscontraptions.blogspot.com).

News: How to Make Tinfoil Cars

In this video, I show you how to build tinfoil cars for crushing with toy Monster Trucks. My son Eston and I love monster trucks. One of the most exciting things when you go to see monster trucks live, is when they crush cars. Problem is, when you use your hot wheels or matchbox cars with your monster trucks, they don’t get smashed. So the realism isn’t there.

How To: NASA Engineer Shows You How to Build a Mini Curiosity Mars Rover Out of LEGOs

You might have seen our post on this last week: It's a working reproduction of the Mars Curiosity Rover made with LEGOs, but it's a bit complicated for anyone without a decent amount of robotics knowledge. Plus, you need to have some Mindstorms NXT and TECHNIC parts lying around. If you want something a little simpler than programming a working LEGO rover, you could always build a scaled model of the MSL out of regular LEGOs. Not only is this easy to build and looks great, but the step-by-ste...

News: This LEGO Mindstorms Submersible Can Be Piloted by Your Xbox Controller

Making little robots with a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set is already cool, but putting one underwater? Now that's just crazy. That didn't stop this engineer, who built a LEGO submarine that can not only maneuver around his fish tank, but can also be remotely controlled with his Xbox controller. The craft has a sealed battery compartment, exposed Power Functions motors, and features real-time communication between it and a laptop using a NXTbee wireless module.

News: NASA's Curiosity Just Got Bricked! Working LEGO Mars Rover Ready for Exploration

Using a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit, a pair of awesome engineers put together this fully functional replica of the Curiosity Mars rover. Not only is it built completely out of LEGOs, it's motorized, programmable, and ready to explore the far reaches of your living room. The rover was built for the Build the Future in Space event at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Four of the six wheels are powered, allowing it to make 360 degree turns, and the arm and mast are both fully controllable. The entire con...

News: Full-Sized Mechanical Skeeball Machine Built Entirely Out of K'Nex—And It Works!

If you played with K'Nex as a kid (or still do), you know that it can take a lot of those tiny little pieces to build something. Just imagine how many it must have taken to make this full-sized, fully functional, coin-operated skeeball machine with a mechanical score counter. Instructables user Shadowman39 (aka Kyle) spent an entire year building this masterpiece. It's the same size as the ones you see in arcades, and it's coin operated, too. But don't try to feed it your pennies, it knows th...

How To: Make a catapult out of office supplies

Looking for something fun to do with all those office supplies you've been stealing from work? Or maybe you just want to goof around in your cubicle? It's possible that you are an honest, dedicated, hard worker, but whatever the case may be- no judgement, just a video guide to making an office supply catapult.

News: Flying Pegasus Operated with LEGO Gears & Cranks

Korean MOC Pages user Kyoung-bae Na, aka edulyoung, constructed this beautiful LEGO automaton of a winged Pegasus. Maneuvered with a series of mechanical LEGO gears and cranks, watch below as Pegasus "hovers", flapping her wings. Kyoung-bae Na sells his creations out of his e-shop, Studio Amida. The Pegasus automaton was previously going for $140, but is no longer listed; however, there is a clownfish currently available for the lower price of $33.50. The models are so fantastic—it makes one ...

News: 4 Years of Spectacularly Pointless Marble Machines

So very pointless, yet unquestionably spectacular. The best kind of "art" performs no other function than to delight the viewer, and Japanese YouTube user Denha's complex marble machines do just that. But are marble machines art? You can call them that—or toys, scientific contraptions, engineering feats—but however you choose to label them, the best marble machines are complicated, skillfully crafted, and driven by the principles of potential energy, kinetic energy and gravity.

How To: Make a homemade stirling engine

Are you looking to build a cool home science experiement? Why not try out a Stirling engine? Wait, what IS a stirling engine? Well... a Stirling engine is a heat engine operating by cyclic compression and expansion of air or other gas, the working fluid, at different temperature levels such that there is a net conversion of heat energy to mechanical work. This project was made from parts around the house and you should be able to do the same. This is a great project to explain how gears work,...

News: Haunted House in Rotting LEGO

Mike Doyle's latest LEGO house (perhaps even more hauntingly beautiful than the last) is a Victorian mansion that transcends the material so effectively, the plastic reads like real rotting bricks and mortar. Beautiful house-devouring trees, created with LEGO hinge cylinders to mimic the texture of tree bark, and ridged 3 mm hose, droid arms and other technic connectors for the creepy, spindly branches.

News: Functional LEGO Snow-Eating Beast

The Stilzkin Indrik is a mighty, mini LEGO Russian crawler, capable of lugging heavy loads over snowy terrain: "It has a large contact surface, which prevents it from sinking into the snow. It offers great traction on almost any surface, and loads of torque to get out of tight spots."

News: Apple Engineer Builds Fully-Functional Ancient Computer With LEGOs

Apple software engineer Andrew Carol built a fully-functional replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, the world's oldest known scientific computer. The 2000-year-old analog device was used by the ancient Greeks to predict the year, date, and time of future solar and lunar eclipses accurately to within two hours. Carol put together the 110 gears (made with 1,500 LEGO Technic parts) in just 30 days. See how it works below. For more information, check out Fast Company's interview with Carol.

Prev Page