Vin Marshall

I recently moved my shop, and in addition to the big issues, from forklift rental to sleep deprivation, we also had to deal with things like three-phase power, a variation of power delivery often used for big equipment. The old shop had it and the new shop doesn't. So what the heck is three-phase power and how can you convert machinery to go from the more common single-phase to three-phase and vice versa? Read on.

Do you ever wonder how you can simultaneously prevent identity theft and learn more about computers? Sure, we all do.

It's time for another Dynamite Dissection.

[Note: No dynamite was used in this Dynamite Dissection. Do not attempt to do anything like this on your own.]

I had a VW 1600 engine that needed to be torn down. And I had a camera. Now, you have a photo gallery of the innards of that engine, which makes for an easy walk-through of the parts make your car go.

I've been careless at times. We all have. I try to address safety issues in posts about my projects, but it is all too easy to ignore the boring safety lecture and skip ahead to laughing about the gas-powered bumper-car rollovers, or Gocke shooting bottle rockets at my head. (References to some of the TE videos, if you're not familiar).

Every now and then, I come across someone's story in which a glossed-over safety warning had very real consequences. More often than not, they involve things not so unlike what you and I do all the time.

In this particular incident, a welder destroyed his body and nearly killed himself with simple brake cleaner.

We decided to dissect a television for the edification of PopSci readers. Then we decided to do it in a slightly unconventional way. Check out the photo gallery for a glimpse of what happens when you blow up a television.

[Note: No dynamite was used in this Dynamite Dissection. Do not attempt to do anything like this on your own.]

Many of the things we film for TE videos aren't the kind of thing you'd want to put an expensive camera anywhere near. Some of them aren't even the kind of thing you'd want to put a cheap camera near. To expand our recording options, I built a protective housing for a lipstick camera. Here's the how-to and video of us trying to destroy it. After a weekend of exploding propane tanks right next to it, it is still going strong.

The average home builder could go his or her entire life without drawing a line in CAD, but it'd be a shame. Three-dimensional rendering programs like CAD let you, or someone else, visualize what you're about to build with high accuracy. That lets you suss out potential problems, sort out fine details, more easily outsource parts of the build and share your groundbreaking designs with your peers (or your wife). CAD software is also useful if you're producing drawings of extensive projects, or drawings that need to be revised frequently, or drawings on which multiple people are collaborating. Paper and pencil drafting methods, themselves far from easy to master, fall short when projects get bigger - especially absent a team of draftsmen working in your shop. For me, the need to share and collaborate on drawings was the final straw that pushed my drafting into the modern age. And fortunately, there are a lot of inexpensive options for someone just dipping their toe in the CAD waters. Here's a run down of the options I considered and the software I chose.

Perhaps you've heard of TGIMBOEJ? The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk is a great concept: a few USPS medium sized flat rate boxes floating around amongst the country's electronics nerds. A sort of cross-pollenation for junk bins.

A box of junk shows up on your door step. Take what you want, add some new gems, and send it back on its way. One of those boxes just arrived here at TE Motorworks.

I've always thought it would be funny to build scale-size exploding grain silos for a model train layout. I've also had problems recently with pilot flames blowing out in some of our larger blow-something-flammable-through-something-on-fire projects. Both of these things made clear to me that I needed a good source of high-voltage sparks. So I built a buzz coil, a project derived from the ignition on a Model T that you can toss together to satisfy all your sparking needs with a just a few common automotive parts.

While Letterman's Grinder Girls proved that the best use for an angle grinder is to let beautiful women in bondage gear make sparks, it's actually one of the more versatile tools you can keep in the shop. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility: Get too trigger happy and you can quickly destroy your project and your fingers. Here's your crash course to wielding one of the more badass of the handheld power tool genre.

What: Angle Grinder

Why: There are few faster ways to abrasively remove material from steel, expecially with something handheld.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I keep at least one Variac around at all times as a prop, should a sci-fi / horror movie erupt without warning in my shop. The Variac, besides looking like an electronic torture device, is a specialized type of autotransformer. An automotive ignition coil, the part under your hood that generates the super high voltage needed to fire the spark in a spark plug, is another. I cut one in half with a bandsaw to see how it works.

Forging steel is significant for several reasons. It's one of the oldest metal-forming operations in existence. Blacksmiths throughout history have (and continue to) forge steel to create things ranging from practical to beautiful and everywhere in between. Industrial processes often involve forging not only for the efficiency with which it forms metal, but also for the way in which it strengthens the part by aligning the grains in the steel along the lines of its shape. Did you know that you could be doing this same time-tested technique at home? Here is how I built my own propane forge.

Hi. My name is Vin and I'm an addict. I can't stop buying electronic junk. I know it's only filling up bins in my shop and taking money I could be pouring into more productive hobbies, like drinking and shooting guns. But what if the completion of some future project, some really crucial bit of hijinks, hinges entirely on my having a switch designed to discharge massive capacitors? Then what, huh?

Am I supposed to just assume my local Radio Shack will have my back? Not likely.

This is a weld-on tank bung; a means of attaching pipe threads to a vessel. It is intended to be welded onto the wall of a tank or pressure vessel, providing solid pipe threads in a material typically too thin to be tapped for pipe threads. On some occasions I've used them for that purpose. On others, I've found that they make a great component in pneumatic cannons. More on this obscure part after the jump.

Steel just as it comes from the steel yard looks undeniably cool. If you leave it that way though, you'll be treated to a rusty piece of metal in short order, as the iron in the steel inevitably oxidizes from the moisture in the air. To keep it clean, you need some kind of coating that seals off the surface. You can paint it and you can coat it with a clear polyurethane, but my favorite finish is simple bowling alley wax.