If this fantasy football thing doesn't work out for DMD...

[General Itals]

 

Don't forget to check out the video, too.

[TimC]

You need to login cause it's Canadian.

[General Itals]

Darn, I'll post the story, but trust me, the video was the reason I posted this.

 

The joy of making stuff

A new breed of mechanics, hackers, tinkerers and garage inventors are united by the urge to make the off-beat and outrageous just for the fun of it.

BY RICHARD CHIN

Pioneer Press

Article Last Updated: 10/27/2007 12:02:40 AM CDT

 

 

At a remote location in Forest Lake, a camera crew gathered recently to film explosions, skimpily dressed women and guys shooting potato cannons at the crotch of a scarecrow.

 

It sounds like the makings of a low-budget action movie, but it was actually a how-to video.

 

Called "Barrage Garage," the project is the brainchild of William Gurstelle, a Minneapolis engineer-turned-writer who specializes in do-it-yourself books about "highly kinetic science experiments."

 

In other words, tennis-ball mortars, backyard catapults, homemade smoke bombs and something called the "Cincinnati fire kite."

 

His latest project is a two-part video series to be sold on the Internet that will show you how to make a fireball from nondairy coffee creamer, a Mentos eruption and an exploding hydrogen balloon, as demonstrated by a pair of attractive models.

 

Gurstelle and his cohorts are part of a larger trend, a new breed of mechanics, hackers, tinkerers and garage inventors who are making stuff not really to save money or get rich or create something practical.

 

They're in it for the self-expression.

 

The movement is fueled by Web sites like www.instructables.com, an Internet show-and-tell where proud contributors will lead you through the steps of how they made a TV-remote jammer, edible glowing UV-reactive Jell-O or a home-built teleprompter.

 

There's also a magazine, MAKE: Technology on Your Time. A sort of Martha Stewart magazine for geeks and gearheads, it's devoted to do-it-yourself projects like a mobile drive-in movie projector, a bicycle that can recharge an iPod and a flute made out of a turkey baster.

The magazine, launched in 2005, also has started sponsoring gatherings around the country called Maker Faires. They attract thousands of people interested in showing off or seeing home-brewed projects, forging a renaissance in do-it-together technology for the sake of fun.

 

"I think there's a lot of people who feel they want to own their gadgets and not have their gadgets own them," said Gurstelle.

 

And soon there may be a television show called "Make:TV." Twin Cities Public Television is working on a TV version of the magazine that it hopes to get on the air on PBS stations next year.

 

Whether it's modifying a VCR into a programmable cat feeder, or pushing the frontiers of kite aerial photography or making a guitar out of a cigar box, the point is to show others that even in a digital, high-tech world, you can still make something in your basement that will make your friends and neighbors say, "Cool! How did you do that?"

 

Here's what we mean:

 

EXPLOSIVE FUN

 

The Chinese used to call it the "bandit-burning, vision-obscuring, magic fireball," according to Gurstelle.

But the author of books like "Backyard Ballistics," "The Art of the Catapult" and "Whoosh Boom Splat" simply calls it the "Cremora bomb."

 

The effect of combining gunpowder and a really off-label use of powdered nondairy coffee creamer results in "just the greatest special effects fireball," Gurstelle said. "It just roils."

 

With the help of a production crew and a couple of model/actress coeds, Gurstelle plans to show you how to make your own Cremora bomb in the videos he wants to sell via the Internet at williamgurstelle.com.

 

Using materials that you can mostly get from the hardware store, Gurstelle demonstrates how to make your own gunpowder ("The most significant chemical discovery in the history of mankind."), a potato cannon ignited by a Taser ("A true advance in potato gun technology."), an exploding hydrogen balloon ("It makes a big fireball. Very cool.") and smoke bombs made from powdered sugar and stump-remover chemicals ("It's not every stump remover. It's only certain kinds. That's why you have to buy the video.").

 

"My neighbors live in fear of me," said Gurstelle, who is also a contributing editor for MAKE magazine.

 

And will the video be the nightmare of the parents of adolescent boys?

 

"Yeah, kind of," Gurstelle said. "But it's not a terrorist handbook."

 

As in his books, Gurstelle tries to slip in some science and history along with the explosions. And Gurstelle said he's trying to teach the safe way of making things go boom.

 

"I feel like Harry Potter in these," said Amanda Paulson, a 20-year-old junior at the University of St. Thomas, of the safety glasses she has to wear for the video shoot.

 

"We're, like, in little tank tops and shorts. It's so cold. But we're going to blow something up soon," said Lindsay Boelter, another St. Thomas student hired for the video.

 

And that's what they did, shooting potato cannons at a scarecrow, strutting through a curtain of smoke made by a smoke bomb and running away from the ball of flame created by a Cremora bomb.

 

"That was excellent. Very 'Charlie's Angels,' " said the director.

 

MAKING MUSIC

 

Give Ed Vogel a glue gun, an ordinary cardboard box, three little pieces of wood and a plastic string and he'll make what he calls "the balloon animal musical instrument."

 

That, according to the 51-year-old Minneapolis resident, is a musical instrument that can be whacked together in about the same amount of time as it takes a magician to blow up and twist a balloon into an animal shape.

 

It's an apt analogy because there's something a little magical in the way that Vogel can glue a stick to the box, tie the string to the stick and then start plucking out a recognizable "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in five minutes flat.

 

Vogel started honing his cardboard-musical-instrument construction skills about three years ago when he was a volunteer music teacher and sometimes encountered kids who couldn't afford their own instruments.

 

Now he's teaching kids to make their own guitars at places like Leonardo's Basement, a youth workshop in South Minneapolis.

 

"An 8-year-old has to be able to do this," said Vogel, who works as an electronics technician.

 

His specialty is cigar-box guitars, the same sort of traditional folk instrument that was the first guitar for guys like Bo Diddley and Doc Watson, Vogel said.

 

One of Vogel's instruments is a three-string design with a Partagas brand cigar-box body and a red oak neck.

 

"If you use poplar, it doesn't sound quite as good," he said. "I tried a couple different strings, but I found mason twine seemed to be the best."

 

The frets are nails held on to the neck by rubber bands, and the tuning pegs are hardware store eyebolts and nuts. And, yes, there's some duct tape involved.

 

"The epitome of my goal in life is to make something out of nothing," he said.

 

By wiring a contact microphone to an old Sony cassette player, Vogel can turn his cigar-box guitar into a cigar-box electric guitar.

 

"You hit play and you are Hendrix," he said. "You can't say no to something that fun."

 

SHOOTING SHIRTS

 

Casimir Sienkiewicz emerged from his engineering firm's office in St. Paul's Lowertown neighborhood holding what looked like a prop from a James Bond movie: a big silver gun with tubes leading to a backpack.

 

Except that Bond probably never thought of smiting Dr. No with a wadded up T-shirt.

 

Sienkiewicz, a 32-year-old Minneapolis resident, owns a company that designs medical and aerospace engineering devices. But in his free time, he built what may be the world's biggest T-shirt cannon.

 

"It's kind of your standard potato gun gone overboard," he said.

 

The project started when a friend of Sienkiewicz was interested in a tool he could use to launch T-shirts into the upper decks of sports stadiums.

 

"He was a mascot for a team," Sienkiewicz said.

 

Sienkiewicz put together a device made of about $1,000 in parts: aircraft grade aluminum; high-performance automotive fittings; underground sprinkler valves; a trigger mechanism from a paint gun; and an Aqua Lung, a scuba diving tank capable of holding 3,000 pounds per square inch of pressurized gas.

 

The result: a 5-foot-long gun capable of launching a T-shirt more than the length of a football field.

 

"We can get it on the roof of the building next door," Sienkiewicz said, sending T-shirts arcing across the street.

 

His next project: a pulse jet engine that he intends to attach to a go-kart.

 

"'Cause it's fun," he said.

 

Richard Chin can be reached at rchin@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5560.

Edited October 27, 2007 by General Itals

[DMD]

AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!