Summer Projects
By Sirius, it is the dog days of summer, a time of weekend projects, puttering in the garage and the yard, making a general mess of things and whacking a knuckle or slicing open a nasty piece of your thumb because the clamp that you should have used was on the other end of the bench and you just needed to make a quick cut with the circular saw.
This is my bookmark list of easy-n-fun quick project Howto sites that I go to and have on occasion actually produced a completed item of some kind.
For the practical-minded, there is ToolMonger’s One-Beer Projects. Topics focus on the eminently practical tasks that might be a tad daunting if you’ve never attempted it before–fixing a leaky faucet or a sprinkler system, balancing your A/C, fixing a hole in the wall or installing a ceiling fan. The posts are in the form of podcast downloads, so if you’re looking for diagrams and pictures with red circles and arrows, this might not be for your, but they’re entertaining all the same. And you can drink a beer. It says so right in the name of the podcast.
Instructables.com is less likely to help you with something you need to know how to do, but is more likely to be useful with something you want to know how to do. Some sample projects you can find detailed walkthroughs and photos of would include how to make a giant match, how to make a belt out of an NES controller, and a home wind turbine. Be sure to check out the “not liable” section for projects labelled “don’t try this at home, but if did, here’s what you might want to do…”
Make Magazine is THE home for projects large and small, silly and practical. Every week, Make’s own Geeky MC, Bre Pettis, produces a video called Weekend Projects where he takes you through a quick project you can start and finish hopefully in an afternoon or less. Recent weeks’ projects have been power tool racers, a potato gun, and a jam jar jet, decidedly impractical projects, though others have included silk screening, bird feeder webcams, and Basic Stamp microcontroller projects.
If you want to let your kids run their own projects, then check out the Howtoons. A short comic book with obligatory snarky teens, Howtoons projects are simple and use common household items, for the most part, and are almost always fun and at times, a blast. I am thinking of the marshmallow guns, which I turned into a birthday party project for my son last year, and was a huge hit, albeit something of a mess.
My current project is my commuter motorized bicycle, as previously blogged. Status update: Engine has arrived, and am now currently working out minor kinks with the installation. I should be ready to begin seriously using this thing before the start of next week.
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