I went to the Charlotte Hamfest two weeks ago and picked up another radio kit to build. My interest in home-brew radio was really what got me interested in ham radio. You can access my project log (Plog) by clicking here.

Following a link in the most recent issue of Nuts and Volts magazine, I found the Thinkbotics website. They've got a lot of cool projects there but the one that really caught my eye was the EM-15 Electromagnetic Coil Gun. With 12 volts of battery power, this little baby can hurl a 30 caliber sized steel slug up to 129 feet per second.

So maybe it's not high speed or high powered but the idea of firing a projectile without the need for fast burning chemicals is still pretty cool.

They don't have the complete plans or diagrams on their website yet although they are available in the March 2008 issue of Nuts and Volts which you can pick up at most better bookstores and new agents.

A long time ago I posted a comment on another article pointing to this website, but he's done a lot of work since then, and it definately deserves a full article of its own.

This website has everything you would ever want to know about making your own skin on frame kayak. It uses modern materials (clear plastic, epoxy) to build something reasonably similar to a genuine kayak. Really cool stuff. I bought some 1/2" plywood to make some frames, but it's sitting on my project queue at the moment (promised the wife I would finish the soap box car for the race this year....)

Warning many a pleasant hour of distraction can be spent at this site, you are warned...

Last summer, the museum where I work got me involved with helping out at a summer space camp for kids. While working on this, I realized that I had never made a model rocket! But I built my first one and it was fun to see this little cardboard tube fly over 500 feet up.

If you have an interest in chemistry, rocketry or just watching things burn, check out Recrystalized Rocketry. His homebrew rocket fuels are made with sugar and a few other chemicals.

Just as any good site should, there are safety precautions, good instructions and lots of videos to show you how his projects have worked (or failed to work). It also includes links to other folks who make sugar powered rockets including these folks who plan to put a sugar powered rocket into space!

When I was in college, I wanted to build a radio telescope but couldn't get the funding to do so. But I found this site that shows a VERY easy way to get into radio astronomy.

Old Dish Network and DirecTV antennas are cropping up for a couple of bucks each at thrift stores so you could get into this for very little money.

A very cool french gentleman has built this completely amazing ship model... Well, ok, it's a ship model, but it's large enough to be a ship of it's own right. Totally amazing. Looks like he got help from a television show (and work done by subcontrators that looks like it was done for free). A totally amazing accomplishment nonetheless... Take a Look!

The gentleman who runs Tera Labs has some projects he's done that are nothing short of amazing.

I stumbled across this site while doing a search for homebrew electronics projects. On this site, I found not only electronics, but scientific glass blowing, X-ray pictures, experiments and a virtual museum.

This is definitely worth a visit if only to see how to make really neat glassware.

Sorry about the slowness when it comes to posting, I just have less time for the website. Rest assured, I'm not going away, it's just taken a bit of a backseat in my life. A couple articles a month seems to be about my speed lately.. :) Regardless, here's another one of those cool polyglot websites that run all over the map -- the first two things mentioned are making your own Cathode Ray Tube, and converting a lawnmower to run on Propane, pretty cool!

Ok, this isn't really so much a camera lens as a long focal length newtonian telescope that just happens to have a camera mounted to it instead of an eyepiece; but the author clearly is more interested in photography than star gazing, so there you go. ;)

Here's another thing you can easily make that I thought required a huge corporation to do -- a laser range finder. Works on a really simple principle too, basically just a little simple trig.