A compound bow that shoots two arrows at once
A .22 blank "Launcher" and my first foray in suppressors
Built using a hollow threated tube from the lamps and lighting section of Ace Hardware. Absolutely hurled airsoft bb’s. It was a very cool test bench to play with and I got to try building a suppressor for the first time. At some point the barrel became obstructed without me knowing, and upon firing the brass chamber exploded peppering me with shrapnel. To this day I still have a chunk of brass lodged in my right hand pinky.
Handheld flame thrower
Giant Newton's cradle
My high school engineering teacher, Mr. Johnson, was showing the class his newtons cradle one day and by the next day someone had broken it. He sat the class down and told us how it was a gift to him and he wanted an apology, I don’t know if he ever got that apology but he did get this comically large Newtons cradle from me and a friend. I used bocce balls, drilled a hole in the top, welded up a frame using my harbor freight MIG welder and strung the balls up.
Custom made knives
The best projects are the ones that require you to build and finish another project before you can finish the main project. For this project I had to find a way to heat treat the steel to harden it, for this I first attempted to build an electric kiln which did not get hot enough, and then I built the power supply (featured in its own post) which powered a homemade induction heater. To this day my brother and I still make custom knives from time to time when I’m home, although his turn out much nicer than mine.
Induction heater
An induction heater uses an electromagnet to pump your target material with alternating magnetic fields. These changing magnetic fields induce a voltage inside the material which essentially short circuits with itself, heating it up. I used this to heat treat some of the custom knives I made
Custom welded tables
This was my first welding project ever. I built this table using angle iron and marble floor tiles from Home Depot. I used threaded couplings and round head bolts as adjustable feet and painted the whole thing in a nice metallic spray paint. The cool thing with this table is that the floor tiles are at most ~$5 each and they come in dozens of styles, so at a later date you can swap them out and completely change the look of the table. I built one for my mom and then later one for my sister
Failed DIY toroidal transformer
A transformer is an electrical component used to convert an (ac) voltage to a higher or lower voltage. The output voltage is determined by the ratio of the input coil windings to the output coil windings. If you have one turn of copper wire on the input side and 100 turns on the output, your voltage will be multiplied 100 times, with an equivalent reduction to current. I wanted to build a power supply to feed an induction heater but in order to do this I first needed to step down the voltage coming out of the wall socket. Proper pre built toroidal transformers were too expensive for me at the time so I decided to try and build one, thinking I knew how they worked. Transformers rely on a ferrous metal core to help contain the magnetic field produced by the input winding, I thought that I could use a ferrous steel powder cast in resin to create the core of my transformer in any shape I wanted. After casting the black iron powder in resin I wrapped it a couple thousand turns of thin wire, covered it in tape and then added a couple hundred turns of thick wire (in a known ratio) and plugged it into the wall. I believe it did have a small output voltage but nothing close to what I was expecting, plus it heated up really quick. I eventually purchased a proper toroidal transformer to complete the power supply.
Distilling my own grain alcohol
I started with amazon ordered brewers yeast, sugar and corn, later I also made a “Rum” from molasses and sugar and a couple of flavored liquors. I allowed the yeast sugar water to ferment for a month or two and then built my own still which you can see in the background of the pictures. Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water which allows you to heat the mixture up and just boil off the alcohol. You then condense this alcohol vapor and collect it. The first batch I ever made was proper moonshine and it was disgusting, well over 50% alcohol by volume and taste like burnt corn. The later attempts at flavored liquors were far more successful
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