John had always wanted to make his own wrist watch, but never got around to doing it. Then, after inspiration from the Buro Vormkrijgers Pong Clock and David Forbes and his Nixie-tube watch, inspiration hit. He decided to make his own Pong Watch. Several months of design, building and testing later, he has his first prototype, and it looks pretty cool. Though this isn’t going to be a commercial endeavor, he has posted a pretty thorough description of the entire build process on his site, so if this watch strikes your fancy, and you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build your own. It’s classictastic.
If you’re a fan of soft serve ice cream, the Cuisinart Ice-45 is the perfect at home/do it yourself solution for creating those frozen desserts of deliciousness (ice cream, yogurt, and sorbet). Able to make 1.5 quarts of soft serve in as little as 20 minutes (though from the reviews you can expect it to take more like 30-40), the Ice-45 features a cone holder and three built-in condiment dispensers so you can add your mix-in or sprinkle of choice. Definitely one cool device.
Let your dog play spaceship commander and let him have a point of view with the Pet Peek dog window. Designed to ease your best friend’s curiosity about what’s on the other side of the fence (and hopefully stop him from barking at the unidentified mystery guest), the Pet Peek is a durable, clear, hard plastic dome 9.5 inches in diameter that allows your dog to poke his nose in and see exactly what’s going on around him. The Pet Peek comes complete with a black trim-ring and all necessary hardware for an easy do-it-yourself installation into any wooden fence, just mount it and wait for the tail wag of approval as Fido’s world suddenly expands far beyond his usual fenced in area.
What’s cooler than building your own jet engine? If you said nothing, you’d be correct. The guys at Bad Brothers Racing and Gary’s Jet Journal have teamed up to bring you instructions for building one of the most bad-ass ways of powering any vehicle: a jet engine. Using an automotive turbo, a homemade combustion chamber, and a little down home ingenuity, you too can burn down the highway on your own jet-powered vehicle of choice. I for one would love to see a jet-powered skateboard, though it’s partly because I’m sure it would make for some great video of a guy falling flat on his face at greater than highway speeds (though I would want it to be one of those “and he walked away unharmed” type videos, otherwise I’d just feel bad for they guy, taking one for the team like that and all).
The problem with doing it yourself is that you often need quite a bit of space and a bunch of really expensive tools to get the job done right. Not everyone has a dynamometer in their backyard for measuring horsepower or a laser cutter for cranking out that prototype you’ve been working on. TechShop aims [...]
