From Make: Volume 8

So I just finished Orly the Ornithopter from Make: volume 8 and I have some tips. If you’re interested in the project just follow the link and you can download the plans as a pdf.

On to the tips:

• Buy the accelerator (L). It’s worth the extra 5-6 bucks. Without it it’s much messier and much harder to get the pieces to stay in the spot you want them to stay in. If you can’t get accelerator or really don’t want to spend the money, then use the glue stick (M) to help hold the piece in place while the CA dries.
• 16 lb. paper (G) (as far as I can ascertain) is pretty much standard printer paper. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that.
• On step 1c., you should use the glue stick (M). Basically, I coated the whole 2″x2″ piece of 16 lb. paper (G) with it before I started to roll it around the music wire (E) (the music wire is simply a guide). It enables the paper to stay tight as you roll and gives you the ability to remove the music wire before you coat the paper with CA (K).
• They give the wrong measurement for the “crank/front motor attachment wire” on the materials page. I used about 5″ of music wire (E) and simply cut off the excess once it was through the crankshaft tube in step 1e.
• The “Full-scale templates” they give online is not correctly to scale, use the image file I’ve uploaded instead. It’s of much higher resolution and it’s the proper scale. I’ll make and upload the template if there’s anyone interested.

I was a little disappointed when I first launched the little guy. I would wind it up, throw it, and it seemed to actually go less far than if I simply just threw it without the rubber band. For the best effect, don’t throw it. Instead, wind it up and let it fly away from your hand. I was able to get about 3 times the distance with the latter method.

My next goal is to possibly motorize my ornithopter. I have some of those toy helicopters that I’ve received over the last few Christmases (that’s suppose to be the plural of Christmas) and I’ve since broken the rotor of one of them. Hopefully, I can rip the guts out and make a remote controlled ornithopter. I’ll post it up if I do.

Having the “/home” directory tree on it’s own partition has several advantages, the biggest perhaps being that you can reinstall the OS (or even a different distro of Linux) without losing all your data. You can do this by keeping the /home partition unchanged and reinstalling the OS which goes in the “/” (root) directory, which can be on a seperate partition.

But you, like me, did not know this when you first installed Ubuntu, and have not created a new partition for “/home” when you first installed Ubuntu. Despair not, it is really simple to move “/home” to its own partition.

Read on at his blog…

As I’ve said, I did not build this. I did help Ricky build it however. In fact it was in my house and I took the pictures. I believe this entitles me to at least post it online.

materials needed:

• hulk hands
• power drill
• 2″ hole saw
• cold beer

step one

Obtain your Hulk Hands. You might have to search around on ebay or someplace like that because I don’t think they sell these at stores too much anymore.

step 2

Use the 2″ hole saw and power drill to drill a hole in the Hulk Hands at the point where he himself would be clenching a beer. Drill down about an inch and tear out the foam that has been drilled into. Continue this until you’re about 3 inches down or until a beer bottle fits snugly. Careful not to tear too much out, else you’ll go through to the handhold.

step 3

Look awesome