MAKE

In This Issue... The Homemade Earth and Fire of Jonathan Garratt “How Maker Faire Changed My Life” Chesapeake Light Craft Boat Kits NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Diabetes Glucose Meter Is Your iPhone How-To: Compressed Air Foam Systems Great Leaps of Imagination: Jules Verne Dale Dougherty is on CBS Radio this AM If You Want to Destroy My Credit… Bendy Corner Arduino Box In the Maker Shed: Solder Time Watch Kit

It’s been over a decade since I’ve thrown clay on a wheel, but watching this video, by David Hobson, of Dorset-based potter Jonathan Garratt, makes me want to return to the art. Garratt is a true maker from beginning to end, including farming his own clay, mixing it in a blunger, drying it over a month, then processing it through a pug mill. He chops his own wood and claims to have nearly 100 tonnes of wood stacked in sheds and under tin tarps outside, which he rotates out on a two-year cycle!

The combination of using local clay and firing with wood gives his work a “flavor” and “character in the finished thing” that you can’t get from packets of clay powder and other firing techniques. Packing his kiln with about 1.5 tonnes of thrown pottery, he says it’s “a bit like a 3D jigsaw.” He fires the clay for 18 hours and 4 days later opens up the kiln to reveal locally sourced and made earthen masterworks. I am, to say the least, impressed!

Ben Hylak, one of the young scientists/inventors honored at the White House yesterday, wrote his touching and inspiring story for the CNN website. The story, and an accompany teaser video, are a preview to this weekend’s episode of “The Next List” on CNN. The program will contain a 30-minute profile of MAKE founder Dale Dougherty and cover MAKE, Maker Faire, and the maker movement. Tune in to CNN, Sunday, 2pm EST, February 12th.

How Maker Faire Changed My Life

More:

• White House Celebrates Young Makers Along with Science Fair Winners
• Maker Teen Inspired by Faire to Build Robot Minions

Editor’s Note: When we were putting together our Make: Ultimate Kit Guide, we wanted to highlight the makers of the awesome kits we reviewed as much as possible. Our 96 pages quickly became chocked full of valuable info, and some of the longer profiles had to be cut down for print. Here is the full version of Dan Woods‘ profile of Bay Area boat kit makers Chesapeake Light Craft.

It wasn’t too many years ago that a small boat built at home from a kit looked more like a floating sandbox than a boat, and a decent-performing kayak was something reserved for factories or master boat builders. But this is all changing. Rapidly. Recently my wife and I tied our kayaks up at our favorite spot in nearby Sausalito and were enjoying sandwiches and beer when up paddled a couple in two flat-out gorgeous, hand-varnished, custom sea kayaks. To our amazement the couple told us they had made them from kits they’d ordered from Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC). So when we decided to include a boat kit in our special kit issue I contacted CLC to learn more.

To my shear delight, it turns out the owner, John Harris, is a passionate MAKE reader and a longtime friend of MAKE contributor Tim Anderson. John was about to teach a boat-building seminar in Port Townsend, Wash., so he sent me a really inspiring video of a father and son building their first boat ever with one of CLC’s kits, and we scheduled a time to chat. The video was amazing. By the time I got John on the phone the next day, I was conspiring to bring him to Maker Faire.

So it turns out that the two gorgeous kayaks I had seen were just two of 21,000 boat kits CLC has shipped. John called them kinetic sculptures. Amen to that.
And August 2011 was their biggest month ever. They grew steadily through the recession. “We’ve done well in the recession; we’ve doubled in annual sales since 2005,” shared John.

I asked John about what’s driving this growth in home-built kits: “I’ve been doing some research and writing about the history of boat kits, and the modern build-your-own-boat movement really got rolling in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It never really faded away, but got a huge second wind as advanced panel-expansion software and CNC machines became accessible to outfits like CLC. The ease of construction has gone way up, as has the sophistication of the designs.”

John went on to say that there’s been far more innovation of small boat building and kits in the last 5 years than in the prior 13 years. Today it’s possible to produce kits that are easier to build, with new materials that are not only more beautiful but enable more sophisticated and better performing boats.

As is the case with many kits, trying to save on the cost of a boat is not the reason why most people want to build from a kit. John explained, “By far the number one reason people are drawn to our kits is for the shear joy of building something. A secondary driver would be to build a boat with personalized features they can’t find in a factory-built boat.”

Interestingly, John pointed out that another strategic benefit of CNC is that it enables them to offer a very broad selection of boat designs in their catalog (over 84 and growing) without the need to carry a deep and capital-draining inventory of kits. When a customer orders a design, they effectively cut, pack, and ship a custom kit.

CLC’s primary focus is helping first-time boat builders to overcome the natural trepidation of building a kit boat from a box of parts that looks, well, like anything but a boat. And John takes pride in their documentation, support, and online forums. “It’s part of being a modern company. We get hammered on that forum if we fumble a detail in an instruction manual or the fit of some parts, but we deal with it right there in public and get on with things. I think an open forum like that builds confidence with your customers — and they need confidence before they drop a grand on a boat kit and set aside weeks or months of their time.”

CLC has found that many of these newly minuted boat builders — fresh with confidence and new skills — are interested in moving up to more sophisticated designs. So much so that CLC is now expanding their product line to include more sophisticated boat designs.

CLC’s basic kayak kit — the kind I gushed over on the dock in Sausalito — will run around $2,000 and take about 80 hours for a typical person to build from start to finish.

For more information, visit clcboats.com.

For 175 kit reviews, plus awesome features, pick up the full Make: Ultimate Kits Guide 2012, available in the Maker Shed. Also, be sure to check out our online, searchable site dedicated to kit reviews, kits.makezine.com!

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Diabetes Glucose Meter Is Your iPhone…

Glooko has raised $3.5 million in a new round of funding that will enable it to release new versions of its solution to help people with diabetes monitor their glucose intake more easily.

The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership along with existing investors. The company’s product is one more example of the “quantified self” trend, where people can gain self-knowledge through quantification of the things they do in life.

About 25 million people live with diabetes in the U.S. People with diabetes can’t properly process sugar their blood because their bodies can’t make enough insulin, which bonds with the sugar and turns it into fat. Patients need to inject themselves with synthetic insulin several times a day to keep their blood sugar under control. If they have too little or too much sugar in their blood, the results can be incapacitating or life threatening.

Many people use glucose meters to monitor their sugar intake. The Glooko MeterSync Cable plugs into most standard self-monitoring blood glucose meters and then syncs the data to a Glooko Logobook app on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) devices.

This is an interesting approach, make a somewhat universal cable to attach medical devices to iPhones.

MAKE regular Mike Pantrey, aka Mrsuperpants, returns with this cool page about building on-the-cheap DIY versions of the commercial systems used to make foam and/or “snow” for video, photo, and event special effects. He describes three iterations of his homemade CAFS and a method for making colored foam. [Thanks, Mike!]

Today is the 189th anniversary of the birthday of Jules Verne, the French author of many science fiction classics such as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. You can find a brief tribute to Jules Verne at the Smithsonian Libraries, with the photo below that shows some of the incredible inventions he imagined.

It’s hard to know the kind of impact that Jules Verne had on people, especially those reading his books in the age before movies and television. As a book lover, I have always thought that a book creates its own movie in your head, and it’s your movie, and your imagination that’s doing the work. What Jules Verne offered was the opportunity to imagine worlds that you had never experienced yourself and to travel by sea, by air, by space to find those new worlds. So, in honor of Jules Verne and the leap year, let’s allow our imagination to take great leaps instead of little ones in the year ahead.

More about Jules Verne

If you’re a big fan of Jules Verne, you might join the North American Jules Verne Society unless you’re not living in North America.

Here’s a page that lists all of Verne’s works. I like the short summaries of some of his 54 novels such as:

From Earth To Moon

Barbicane and members of the Baltimore Gun Club conceive of a plan to travel to the moon via a gigantic cannon.

Topsy-Turvy or The Purchase of the North Pole

The North Polar Practical Association has plans on making a purchase of all the territory north of the 84th parallel. This association is in reality the members of the Baltimore Gun Club, including Secretary J.T. Maston, President Impy Barbicane and Captain Nicholl.

Maybe Jules Verne imagined how makers would get together in clubs and do amazing things.

Do you have a favorite Jules Verne novel? I’d have to say that I loved Mysterious Island. I realize there’s some kind of movie version in theaters now, which I’m pretty sure is not as good as the version I created as an eleven-year-old.

Dale Dougherty, MAKE founder and publisher, will be on CBS New Talk Radio this morning (TODAY) at 9:20am PST, talking about 3D printing, what it is and why it’s important.

CBS Radio News Desk
KCBS AM & FM Radio
ALL NEWS 740 AM, 106.9 FM

…hold this thread as I walk away. Artist Dimitri Tsykalov has four more of these giant knit credit cards on display over at Galerie Rabouan Moussion. Just don’t click past image 5/20 unless you want to see naked people covered in raw meat. [via adafruit]

 

I’ve been meaning to do some tests with this relatively new technique for creating flexible parts on the laser cutter. I’ve been meaning to build a new project box for my Arduino. Oomlaut beat me to both!

Ever since we came across this amazing technique for laser cutting hinges we’ve been thinking about what we could do with it. Our initial result is a slightly modified version of our Project Box for Arduino (ADBO), with the bolt rounded corners replaced by lovely plywood arcs. We’re really excited about what’s possible with this technique and will experment further. However if you’d like to make one of these boxes please find the various required files below:

Want to Make Your Own:
On thingiverse (thingiverse.com)
Parts Outline (dxf)
Mechanical Reference (pdf)
More Files and Formats (thingiverse.com)

Bendy Corner Arduino Box at Oomlaut 

The Solder:Time Watch Kit is a Maker Shed favorite for several reasons; it’s simple, it’s functional, and it looks great!  The watch comes unassembled and includes a laser cut acrylic enclosure and wrist strap. The bright red LED display is driven by a PIC16 using a Dallas DS1337+ RTC chip for accurate time keeping. The time is displayed on demand for increased battery life but can be jumpered for always on use. If you’re looking for a great conversation starter, this is it! It seems that every time I wear mine in public people can’t help but ask me where I got it. Of course I tell them “I made it!”