The Fire Piston

Doesn't look like much, but it's actually way cool ->
(click on picture to see it work)

The fire piston is a clever little device for starting a fire when you're say, in the woods and don't want to use a match. Basically, it's a small, handmade piston and cylinder. You place some easy to ignite tinder in a cavity in the end of the piston and smack the piston down inside the closed cylinder. The air inside heats up and viola! the tinder ignites.

Sounds simple, and it is, but actually making one took more time and care than I expected. I used a number of different materials for the piston and found that I could make a working piston out of either hardwood or hard plastic. The tricky part was making a good seal, and making the cylinder end air tight.

The fire piston demonstrates the ideas of 19th century scientists Rudolph Clausius, James Joule, and Julius Meyer. Basically, it shows the relationship between work and heat. Work and heat are the same thing, said those scientists, which was in contrast to the then current notion that heat was a "thing," a mysterious quantity called phlogiston or caloric. Nope, said Clausius, heat is simply the what happens when you do mechanical work in a closed system.

See a movie of my fire piston in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX9odql1Abc

The Maker President

As a maker and rational risk taker, I was thrilled to hear President Obama say this in his inaugural address:

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or

seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Making, like charity, begins at home. Go out and make something cool today. For ideas, visit:

• makezine.com
  
• makezine.tv
  
• instructables.com
  
• wonderhowto.com
  

The Moaster

What happens when you mix a toaster, an arduino, some pressurized CO2, and the same English ingenuity that brought the world the steam engine, the power loom, and the sandwich? You get the Moaster, the world's highest popping toaster.

While I didn't realize the need for such a device before, upon reflection there is no doubt that it serves a crucial need. And it leads to a glorious vision of other amplified, modified appliances. Work must begin immediately upon the world's loudest kitchen timer, built from a series of air powered klaxon horns and kettle drums. Or perhaps the world's most powerful stove burner, an oxyacetylene powered hob with integrated scram-jet technology to boil water faster than you can say "the rural juror's brewery*."

* John Edgar Park (or "Eggy" as he prefers to be called on the set of Make: Television) and I have decided that of all possible lines in an actor's script, this is the most hellish to say.

The Airborne Laser - World's Largest Hunk of Titanium

Titanium alloy is extraordinarily strong, stiff, and light, all qualities coveted by people interested in cramming in as much horsepower into the lightest, strongest package possible. On the flip side, it is extraordinarily expensive, and a real pain in the neck to cut and weld. It is close to impossible to cut with a hacksaw, all but requiring the use of fancy water jet cutters or electrical discharge machining.

Titanium is such a cool material that its has developed its own mystique, even crossing over to non engineers, conjuring up, for many, the promise of a real space age materials – rare, expensive, and high performance. Even though it is one of the more common elements in the earth’s crust, it is so hard to work with that items made from it are necessarily, expensive.

Marketing types have pounced on the metal’s cachet, and it is used as a come-on in sorts of marketing campaigns that seek to project of an image of high tech strength. There are titanium golf balls, titanium coffee cups, titanium rain coats, titanium computers, titanium sunglasses, and titanium condoms. There may actually be some rationalization for including a fleck or two of titanium in a golf ball, but the need to include it in the others doesn’t seem apparent, and in fact most of these items don’t actually contain a lick of it.

One item that does contain titanium, in fact quite a lot of it, is the “ABL”, a gigantic US Air Force airplane-mounted laser, one of the linchpins of U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense system which is the successor to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War Era “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. The ABL is a very large oxygen-iodine laser that is powerful enough, or so its Pentagon designers claim, to destroy a missile during its “boost phase”, the first few minutes after it lifts off and is thrust into the sky by its powerful chemical rocket engines.


Large parts of the missile killing light beam are encased in an approximately 25 foot by 10 foot protruding titanium “belly skin” affixed to the bottom of a heavily modified Boeing 747. This skin, or panel, has 36 holes arranged in eight neat rows of four holes, each hole being slightly larger than one foot in diameter. Through these holes, the jet of steam exhaust generated by the laser’s firing system will be ejected after it locks on and destroys an ascending missile.

When the laser operates, great quantities of hot, highly pressurized steam will rapidly exit the aircraft and extreme measures to protect the airplane and crew are required. The project engineers designed a massive hunk of robot-fabricated titanium, the world’s largest titanium part, for the laser shell because only titanium met the thermal, material strength and chemical requirements of the project.

How to be Interviewed on Live TV

So, maybe you've been trying to figure out how to be interviewed on live television without crashing and burning. Well, don't worry, I can help.

I decided to write this post after I did a live tv spot plugging Make:television on Almanac.

Almanac is the live, weekly public affairs television program produced by Twin Cities Public Television and I was asked to come on the show and talk about Make:Television.

Personally, I've done interviews on over 100 radio and tv stations. I've never died on stage, and actually, they've typically been a lot of fun. Good time, and the interview went just fine.

And, as Andy Warhol said, everybody gets their own fifteen minutes of fame eventually. So, odds are you'll get your time on TV as well. (Hopefully not on Fox Network's COPS.)

When your time comes up, it pays to be prepared.

How to be Interviewed on Live TV
1. Make a personal connection with the person interviewing you. The better the connection, the better the interview. At a minimum learn, memorize, and use that person's name. Sound easy, but a lot of people all of sudden can't remember the name of the interviewer when the lights go on.
2. Know where to look and where not to look. Usually, just look a the person interviewing you and not at the camera.
3. Take it easy with hand gestures. The camera operator will have a hard time tracking if you constantly wave your hands around.
4. Easy to say and hard to do, but: try and relax and have a good time.
5. Dress in solid colors. Bright white shirts and those with patterns make strange moire patterns and should be avoided.
6. Talking about your product or book is great but avoid over plugging it. Hopefully, the interviewer will take care of that for you. But if you get to the end of the interview and your product, book, video, etc hasn't been mentioned then by all means plug away. But do it with restraint and succinctness.

Potato Cannon Instructions - NOW RENDERED IN 3D!!!

This is way, way cool.

In 2006 I wrote an article for Make Magazine which describes in detail how to make a potato cannon. I called it the Night Lighter 36 and it was quite fine piece of work. It was constructed from clear PVC plastic (the better to see the what goes on inside the combustion chamber) and uses a high voltage taser to supply the spark required to ignite the fuel that propels the potato. (Note to the the taser-averse crowd, you could subsitute a flint and steel lantern lighter in the end cap for the the taser. But, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting (or expensive))

As far as spud guns go, it was pretty high tech. Speaking of high tech, the Make magazine website made an interactive 3D rendering of the device available. I didn't know about that until I read Make website editor Phil Torrone's comments on a recent newsgroup post called the Foo Camp Digest.

The technology is exceedingly interesting and interactive 3d rendering of tech projects shows great potential. Check out the 3D PDF for yourself on the Make Mag web site. 

(A bit of self promotion here: this and many other wonderful projects are brilliantly rendered and explained in my book Whoosh Boom Splat. There is a link to Amazon.com to the right -->)

I'm not sure how complicated the software is that makes such interesting drawings. I've doodled around with SolidWorks and AutoCad and, well, I just don't have the patience to learn it. Maybe this one is easier.

Make: Television is on the air!

Make: Television comes to the airwaves!

This is a shot of me, John Edgar Park (who I think I'll start called Eggy for short), and the television show crew working on one of the projects we describe on the show.

As I've mentioned before, I'm one of the producers and on air presenters for the new national television series, Make: Television. It will be carried by roughly 75% of all public television stations in the USA. Many stations including those in the Minneapolis, Washington DC, New York, Miami, and San Francisco areas have already scheduled it into their programming while many others are waiting until later in the year to slot it.

It's a terrific show, if I do say so myself. It's (as the name implies) a show about making things. We feature the inventors artists, musicians, tinkerers, and other folks who mix up art, technology, tools, and imagination to build some of the coolest stuff you could ever imagine.

Truly, it's a show for the times. It's green and clean, as it shows how to make use of things that otherwise might be discarded or junked. The projects we describe are typically low cost and rely more on creativity and imagination than on dollars. Plus it's about coming to terms and feeling comfortable with the technology that permeates modern life.

That might sound high-falutin, but it's true. Visit www.makezine.tv to find out where and when it's on in your town. Episodes will also be made available on the web for those who don't have broadcast access. Use the form on my website williamgurstelle.com to comment and make suggestions.

Water Casts

Those who have read my blog recently are aware of my enjoyment of Victorian age English magazines. One magazine in particular, Pearson's, has caught my interest. While researching bartitsu for an upcoming book, I found that a fascinating article on photographing "water casts."

This is nothing more than taking a picture of a man throwing a bucket of water using a fast shutter speed. But the author, a Victorian/Edwardian age Englishman named Archie Williams has taken some great photos using the premiere photographic equipment available in 1901.



Wrote Williams, "My attention was first drawn to the artistic possibilities latent in a bucketful of water by the manner in which a thatcher damped a pile of straw to make it tough and supple enought for his purpose. With a quick turn of the writst he projected a thin seminciruclar film which covered several square feet, glistening like the sun and suggesting many beautiful forms."

I'm not sure my Nikon D-90 with all of it's metering and digital features could do much better than this Victorian photographer.

Homemade Windmills Across America, ca.1900

Much time on my part has been spent in the sub-basement annex of the University of Minnesota library. That's where they keep the old, old, pre-1900 copies of magazines.

I've been doing research on Bartitsu, a rare hybrid martial art, combining ju-jitsu and boxing and was developed by a Victorian Brit named E. W. Barton Wright. Down there in the stacks, among the crumbling pages, are some of the most interesting reading I've come across.

These magazines are so interesting, I could spend hours (and I have) reading through them when I should be doing something else.

Some days, I can't get enough of those crumbling magazines from America and Britain printed in about 1900. Subject matter? It's all over the board: self defense articles, the habits or African and Asian animals, many, many article on prison life for some reason (and it sounds awful!) and a fair amount on travel to exotic places which back then were actually quite exotic and hard to get to, making magazine accounts about the only way for the average person to get to Asia or Africa.

I came across an account of "Windmills of America." It's interesting to see the home-made designs of windmills made by frontier and homesteading farmers out of the materials available to them. Some of these designs are incredibly complex and they certainly show an ability to design and fabricate mechanisms with I imagine, only rudimentary tools.

Are they efficient? Well, that might be another story. But here they are, rickety looking and wonderful.

Cold Days, Warm Flamethrower

Cold days, warm flamethrower.
Instructions on how to make your own are part of Absinthe and Flamethrowers, coming to all bookstores in June 2009

Absinthe and Flamethrowers Cover

Hot off the press: Here's the cover of my new book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers which will come out in June, 2009. The bold red cover and interesting artistic lettering will make it standout among other books on the bookstore shelves.

Drop me a line using the form on www.williamgurstelle.com if you're interested in being notified when it's on sale.

How to Make a Pole Aerial Photography set up

Make Magazine issue 16, with the cool Spy vs Spy cover, features my how-to article on how to make a pole mounted camera (aka Mast Aerial Photography) by using hobby servo motors and a standard painter's extension pole.

This project isn't terribly hard, requiring only about a half day or so to complete, not including getting the materials.

Pole aerial photography is fun and practical and provides a way to get incredible aerial photographs without ever leaving terra firma.


We liked this project so much that we decided to show how to make in one of the initial episodes of Make:Television, the nationally televised program coming to public television in January 2009.

Developments in High Explosives

The first atomic bombs, of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki variety, worked by basically crashing one piece of highly enriched uranium into another piece in order to start a chain reaction. To do that, I read that US government scientists built specially shaped blocks of explosive. The explosives were cut into precise hexagon and pentagon shapes.

When detonated, the uranium went exactly where it was supposed to go, and ka-boom! But, it's much harder to do than it sounds because of the difficulty in shaping High Explosive charges precisely.

The explosives were machined into shapes like this: -->

I don't think the world needs easier ways to cast high explosives into precise shapes, but the scientists at Los Alamos just announced precisely that: an easy to use, low melting point high explosive that can easily cast into precise shapes.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2008) — Since the discovery of nitroglycerin in 1846, the nitrate ester group of compounds has been known for its explosive properties. A whole series of other nitrate esters have been subsequently put to use as explosives and fuels.

A research team led by David E. Chavez at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) has now developed a novel tetranitrate ester. The compound has a particularly interesting characteristic profile: it is solid at room temperature, is a highly powerful explosive, and can be melt-cast into the desired shape.

The Blowing Things Up Holiday Gift Guide

If you're looking for gift ideas with high energy appeal, the list below may be just the ticket. I think almost every garage tinkerer desperately wants at least some of these items, whether they know it now or not.

1. Interested in pyrotechnics? There are many fine books available, and some not so fine ones. If you're interested in learning how to make fountains, rockets, roman candles, shells, etc, there are two I've found to be excellent.

The first is Introductory Practical Pyrotechnics by Tom Perigrin. I bought it from American Fireworks News (http://www.fireworksnews.com/) . It's not inexpensive, but it's clear and fairly well written. The second is the Dictionary and Manual of Fireworks by George Washington Weingart. It's a much older book and doesn't provide step by step instructions like Perigrins book, but it's a fine supplement to it.



2. When I wrote my first book, Backyard Ballistics, I wasn't sure anybody would like it. I'm pleased to say that people do enjoy it. Over 200,000 copies sold and still going strong! Spud guns, dry cleaner bag balloons, and carbide cannons and such are what makes Makers great. Check it out.

3. Servo motors and radio transmitter. I have so many projects where I need to move something remotely. Recently, I wrote in Make Magazine issue 16 about a pole mounted camera, where the camera is mounted way up on a 20 foot long pole. How to trip the shutter? A servo motor of course. Servo's are great for robot control as well as their standard use controlling throttles and control surfaces on RC vehicles. (If you get a servo and radio for tinkering, use ground frequencies only.)

4. Serious makers and builders really must know something about "physical computing, " that is, sensing and controlling the non-digital, non-virtual world, with computers. The way most makers to that is through microcomputers. I've looked at several. The Make Controller, available from makershed.com has a lot of inputs and outputs including connections to servo motors!. Less expensive and therefore extremely popular is the Arduino. The Arduino is cheap, has several analog and digital inputs and outputs, and is programmable in a C like language. There's also the Basic Stamp, also cheap, but is programmable in Basic for dinosaurs like me. Available at makershed.com

5. Any electronic project requires soldering. Soldering isn't hard (well, too hard) if you have the right tools. This means a good iron and a great work holder. The best work holder I've found is made by Panavise. Panavise's standard #301 vise coupled with the #312 base mount/part tray, and the #315 circuit board holder is the ticket. Simple to use, it allows pieces to be positioned comfortably and securely. It's what serious electronics people use. Thanks to John Edgar Park at Make TV for turning me on to this.

6. I think my book Whoosh Boom Splat is way cool. Plans include a tee-shirt cannon, a steam cannon, and a nifty clothespin shooter that shoots lighted matches. Of course, I may be biased.

7. One of my favorite tools is a taser. Okay, that probably seems weird, but making a spark is often pretty important. Whenever you want to ignite something (say the propellant in a potato cannon, or a gas stream in a flamethrower) a taser works pretty darn well. Much easier than rigging an ignition coil, a taser makes sparks available anywhere, anytime. And, if the bad guys attack, you're ready for that as well. One of the least expensive, but highest voltage ones I've seen is here at Amazon


8. Anybody who makes anything should know about Make Magazine. (I'm a contributing editor there.) Four gigantic issues a year, each chocked full of information on how to make the greatest stuff in the world. See more at http://www.makezine.com/ and if you agree, go ahead and subscribe.

Yellow Fever Vaccinations and Travel Medicine Clinics

Sad but true, the health care system in the US does not work well. One must be a vigilant consumer of health care services.

Later this month, I'm going to the coast of French Guiana. Circumstances dictate that I am required to get a yellow fever vaccination. According to the US Government's CDC website, there is a "low incidence of yellow fever in South America, generally a few hundred reported cases per year."

Strange it may seem but I need to get a yellow fever shot in order to spend a less than a day on a continent of 371,000,000 inhabitants which reports perhaps 400 yellow fever cases per year. It seems to me that I have a much better chance of being struck by lightning, coming under pirate attack or dying by getting hit on the head by a falling coconut.

But rules are rules, so a yellow fever shot I must get. I have very high deductible health insurance and since I've managed being run over by a truck so far this year, I must bear the full cost of vaccination.

I called my doctor who told me that I must go to a clinic that specializes in "travel medicine" since my doctor, (who is a fine physician,) doesn't handle tropical infectious diseases. Fine, I'll call around.

Travel Medicine Clinic A: $120 for the shot, plus $250 for a "consultation." I simply cannot imagine the need for a consultation about something like this. It seems absurd.

Travel Medicine Clinic B: $275 for the shot and a 15 minute consultation with "travel clinic" doctor.

I finally found that the city of St. Paul public health department has a nurse that will vaccinate me if I bring in a doctor's prescription and give them $100 cash money. Much better, but I have better uses for $100.

"Travel Medicine clinics" sound like a blatant marketing ploy, another example of a desperate and broken health care system.

Worlds Fastest Indian?

I've got an upcoming article in Make Magazine about Speed Week, a gathering of fast cars and faster drivers that happens once a year on the salt flats on the Nevada - Utah border. The salt is smooth and goes on for miles. It a perfect place to see how fast your car can really go.

The vehicles (cars and motor cycles) there don't race against each other and not against the clock either. They are simply trying see how fast they can go. And they do go fast.

What's most interesting to me is the incredible amounts of horsepower, and therefore speed that these guys get out of their cars. There are vehicles with 2-liter engines that go over 200 mph. How do they do that? By using fuels that have more energy in them than gasoline or diesel, boosting the pressure of the intake air with a blower, optimizing the engine tuning for speed (at the expense of say, gas mileage,) and streamlining the car body.

I spoke at length with Gary Calvert, a member of the Muckleshoot Indian tribe from Washington State. Really a knowledgeable guy -- he built his vehicle from the wheels up, taking a wing mounted fuel tank from a military airplane (it's large and aerodynamic) adding a Japanese car's V6 and turning it into a really (really) fast car. It burns fuel (nitromethane) and has an enormous turbo charger that radically increases the amount of air going into the pistons which does good things for horsepower.

This car, called a belly tanker, screams across the salt flats.

I sat in it for a while to get the feeling of driving a vehicle like that. I'd sure like to build one myself.

The Barrage Garage DVD!

Two Years in the Making: The Barrage Garage DVD
THE GARAGE WARRIOR’S ULTIMATE VIDEO GUIDE TO ALL THINGS THAT GO BOOM is available for purchase. The Garage Barrage video contains four of my favorite scientific projects. They may be a bit edgy, but I believe they're safe (follow the directions and use your common sense.) Of course, you never really know do you?

But if you are like me, you understand that a bit (just a bit) of danger and excitement is the salt and cayenne pepper in the stew of life. They make things interesting. Of course, if you use too much, they ruin it. so, it's a balance.

And this video is all about projects that fit into a good balance -- danger, excitement, science, fun.
The video was a collaboration between me and a group of professional video producers and writers. I really like it, and I hope you do too.

The projects include making smoke bombs (go here to see the entire project for free!), the Night Lighter 36 Taser-Powered Potato Cannon, a small jet engine (a jam jar jet), and the world famous Mentos Fountain. We've put our own twist on all of these projects to make them easy to do and spectacular to watch.

Plus, there Amanda and Nicole ;)

Ghost Pigeons

Ghost Pigeons - the last enduring testament of a bird's life and premature death.

Recently, I've become aware of what I call "ghost pigeons, " the imprint a pigeon makes on a glass window of a building when it unwittingly flies into it. They are spooky and depressing and kind of pretty all at the same time.

Now that I'm aware of them, I see them all the time when I look out of the windows in downtown office buildings.

If you have any ghost pigeon pix, please post.

Chinese Siege Warfare - Mechanical Artillery & Siege Weapons of Antiquity

Too often, when we talk about siege engines - catapults, trebuchets, ballistae, and so forth - we focus on European technology. But it's in the far east where the story begins, at least for gravity powered siege weaponry.

I recently purchased Chinese Siege Warfare, Mechanical Artillery & Siege Weapons of Antiquity by Liang Jieming. A somewhat difficult book to get a hold of (not available on Amazon as far as I can tell), this 150 page book did much to plug gaps in my knowledge. Although much of the book deals with Chinese pre-gunpowder siege weaponry, there are smaller sections on western designs and some early gunpowder devices.

Incredibly, much of the book has been placed on the web for free, and this book an is absolutely wonderful resource for students of siege engines and model makers.

The book is well illustrated, using a combination of line drawings from old texts and colored pictures of the author's recreations of many of the machines discussed in the text. I noticed that Liang uses rope lashing to connect the wooden members of his machines, which is something I discussed in the Viking Catapult chapter of my book The Art of the Catapult. I've often suspected that the ancient builders, world over, made extensive use of lashed joints as they are strong, rigid, and relatively easy to master.

Overall, a good book filled with hard to find information. I recommend it.

Too Much Clutter in America's Nuclear Attic?

<-- Mark 12 "Brock" atomic weapon

Several newspapers had this or a similar story in it yesterday:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military mistakenly shipped four nuclear-missile detonators to Taiwan in 2006, then failed to detect the error for more than a year, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

Pentagon officials said they didn't know how the detonators had been sent when Taiwan had ordered helicopter batteries or who was responsible. Michael Wynne, the secretary of the Air Force, said the cone-shaped fuses didn't resemble the power batteries that Taiwan had requested.

Wynne said that the misdirected detonators, used to ignite the trigger of a Mark-12 nuclear weapon, didn't pose a security threat. The triggers couldn't be used to detonate other weapons, officials said.

That's strange. Did someone at the airbase from which they were shipped, look at a packing list that said "helicopter battery" and accidentally pack 4 nuclear bomb triggers? I imagine they have a label on the box that reads "WARNING! NUCLEAR BOMB TRIGGER INSIDE. DO NOT USE HOOKS" or something like that. Still I guess mistakes happen.

But here's what I really don't understand. The triggers were for Mark -12 nuclear weapons. The Mark 12, nicknamed "Brock" by those who have pet names for atomic bombs, hasn't been part of the nuclear arsenal since 1962. These things have been outdated for 46 years. I think (this is no joke) that a Mark-12 trigger uses vacuum tubes.

So, my question is, why are we keeping so much junk in our nuclear attics? Even my mom finally cleared out her basement (throwing away my collection of vintage Archie comics, but that's another issue.)

No doubt there are still a thousand crates of horse liniment for the cavalry or a million sticks of slowmatch for flintlock rifles piled next to the Mark-12 triggers as well.