A little context – my dad’s father died almost two years ago, and I’d been hanging onto a shell casing from the 5-gun veteran’s salute since then.

original shell casing

I decided to make a pen out of the casing. See a breakdown of process below. Much credit to Jordan, because you all know I can’t operate any of the shop machinery. Yet.

1. Cut off the casing end from hollow shell body and drill a wider opening. The brass is very soft so use a rubber clamp and a jewelry cutting saw.
2. Cut, hollow out, and finish hard wood shaft for pen body extension. Stain if you so choose. I used a light cherry stain as the wood was almost white.

before assembly

3. Epoxy and insert wood shaft into wide end of shell casing, and epoxy casing end to opposite end of wood shaft as pen cap.

shell casing end pen cap

4. Mold hot glue into removable stopper for pen tip using WD-40 to keep glue from sticking to ink insert and shape into cone using heated blade (neat side effect is that the glue becomes glassy and transparent). Pop in pen tip with glue stopper!

hot glue stopper for pen tip

…and fin!

finished product

I hope he likes it. I’m going to give it to him on Friday.

Quick crafting project: yarn words (and acronyms). Found this at Craft, but here are the full instructions.

I couldn’t find any wire reinforced clothesline, so experimented with thermostat wire and others: basically, check out the wire section of your local hardware store and test what they’ve got. You’re looking for something bendable, but that will retain its shape, and can definitely be doubled up on itself, hopefully flush, without a little loop at the end. Some wire types I found did this better than others.

Also, you’ll want to use chunky, bulky or worsted weight yarn, or else you’ll be winding for a very long time.

I’ve made three, and they’re pretty quick once you get going, other than having to remember how to do cursive and remembering that i’s and j’s have the problem of not easily being able to do dots with this format.

“Weird” was my first, then “rtfm” and “pebkac.” Other geeky words and acronyms may follow.

Here’s a photo of what we have so far:

The three tables were built today.  Two of them are pretty basic, but what’s that wierd stuff on the bottom of that one?

That’s a cockamamie caster system to make this table roll.  The casters are on a hinged board so the legs can still operate as normal when the board flips up, but when the table is lifted the board will flip itself down and those hinged supports above it brace the casters into position, making it a pretty sturdy rolling table.  Nathan Witt got this idea from another hackerspace.  (If anyone knows which one it was I’ll credit them, thanks for the idea!)

You can also see our new shelves behind the tables.  Jen Savage and Tim Winkler donated them and they’ll definitely see plenty of good use here.  Thanks guys!

I started working on a hollow book, and Tim Saylor made some incredibly apropos snow shoes.

The design was completely ad hoc and the workmanship was sub-sub-standard, but it came together exactly as I pictured it.  The biggest problem was that neither of us really knew how to make a light box.  Most importantly we didn’t have poster board to use for the backing or lights to properly light the item.  We just built the box and covered it with some fabric we found in the space, and we positioned the box to use ambient lighting as well as we could.  If someone were to make one of these in more than 15 minutes, those would be the things to change.  That and actually looking at real instructions from people who know what they’re doing.

Happy hacking!

IT Freely Season 2, Episode 15, direct link.

My flex resistor jacket is finally finished. After a month and a half of failures and a whole bunch of setbacks, the PS:One logo is finally embedded with twenty big LEDs which are attach to a circuit board and a flex resistor. The LEDs only light up when the right elbow is bent to a certain extent. It runs off of two AA batteries held along with the circuit board in a pocket on the left shoulder.

The jacket was premiered (sort of) at Digital Breakdown on Dec. 18th to help promote PS:One. Bunches of recently printed stickers didn’t hurt either. Luckily, the jacket is perfect for dancing.

Thanks to Jeff Kantarek and Jordan Bunker for their huge amounts of help on this project. Without their expertise this jacket would not be glowy.

Fabric Light Bright PDF

[EDIT!]: This project is under a Creative Commons license!

Fabric Light-Bright by Eli Skipp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.