DIY

Make magazine has just put up its $20 and under holiday gift guide, chock full of starter electronics kits like a barebones Arduino and tools for your favorite tinkerer. Or if you're the only one who solders in your circle, pick up a few kits now and give away the finished product.

I've built a number of kits from Make and they're a great way to learn and hone your DIY electronics skills, with super-clear instructions. After the jump, I add my five additions to their list, with an eye toward encouraging the young hijinks-prone Makers-in-training on your list.

Hi. My name is Vin and I'm an addict. I can't stop buying electronic junk. I know it's only filling up bins in my shop and taking money I could be pouring into more productive hobbies, like drinking and shooting guns. But what if the completion of some future project, some really crucial bit of hijinks, hinges entirely on my having a switch designed to discharge massive capacitors? Then what, huh?

Am I supposed to just assume my local Radio Shack will have my back? Not likely.

This is a weld-on tank bung; a means of attaching pipe threads to a vessel. It is intended to be welded onto the wall of a tank or pressure vessel, providing solid pipe threads in a material typically too thin to be tapped for pipe threads. On some occasions I've used them for that purpose. On others, I've found that they make a great component in pneumatic cannons. More on this obscure part after the jump.

Since we inaugurated Guess This Tool, you've all proven way too hard to stump, so for this week's contest, we're mixing it up a bit and giving you a mystery part rather than a tool.

Steel just as it comes from the steel yard looks undeniably cool. If you leave it that way though, you'll be treated to a rusty piece of metal in short order, as the iron in the steel inevitably oxidizes from the moisture in the air. To keep it clean, you need some kind of coating that seals off the surface. You can paint it and you can coat it with a clear polyurethane, but my favorite finish is simple bowling alley wax.

Building things from metal can seem intimidating—metal just feels so much more permanent than, say, wood, and with the all the sparks and pressurized cylinders, it seems like just a matter of time before you blow up your shop. But once you know your way around a few key tools, you'll be amazed at how simple metalwork can be. Case in point: the plasma cutter. This small, relatively inexpensive machine has one dial, no cumbersome gas tanks, and can zip through any conductive material faster than a jigsaw through pine. It's also basically a sci-fi machine made real (c'mon, it slices through steel with hafnium and air!). And since they're for sale in most big-box home stores, you can even put one on your X-mas list. Master this, and your metal creations can take on just about any shape you want.

Take a piece of tissue paper. Support the edges and press down on the center to form a bowl. The ripples that will form are extra material with nowhere to go. Now imagine the tissue was metal and you see one of the essential difficulties of putting compound curves (as opposed to a simple curve, aka a fold) into sheet metal when you need a little impression and don't have a stamping machine handy. But if you know exactly where and how to hit, you can do it with nothing more than a mallet and a tree stump.

You've almost certainly seen a pressure gauge somewhere: on an air compressor, a steam boiler or perhaps an automotive vacuum gauge. Have you thought much about how that gauge works? Magic? Elves? We'll rip one open to find out.

Yesterday's mystery tool is officially known as the Monitor model 107 "Patented Wire Stitcher" manufactured by the Latham Machinery Company of Chicago, IL. Bookbinding operations like the one that gave the machine to me used it to place those big staples in thick stacks of pages to be bound. I'm sure you've always wondered what kind of stapler it takes to make that staple. This is it.