just an asterisk

My father can tell you, off the top of his head, how to build a set of shelves. As I grew up, wooden shelves, TV stands, beds and more were carefully designed, built and finished with a very similar reddish brown lacquer in the garage. Unfortunately, this natural ability wasn’t passed on. Instead, I’ve had to develop a knack for reading instructions. As luck would have it, the internet is a great place to find guides for your DIY adventures… You just have to know where to look.

Enter Instructables and Make: places where enthusiasts and experts can post step by step instructions on how things should be done. And they do! These two sites have slightly different flavors. Instructables tends to have instructions on nearly any topic, with more focus on creating achievable projects for our day to day lives. Makezine is more electronics oriented (although not entirely) and contains some projects that are for serious enthusiasts. Here’s a brief guide to both to get you started.
Instructables is made from a large community of DIY enthusiasts. Here you can find a remarkable variety of how-to posts.  For example:

• Make a hanging pot rack
• Make a speaker from a Hallmark Greeting Card (with a speaker)
• How to bake bread
• Convert your honda accord to run on trash

There are thousands of articles, each with photos and decent instructions.  Some of  the newer articles even have video.
One of the more interesting features is a box on every page where you can ask a question to the Instructables community.
At its core, Instructables.com is a great place to browse the ingenuity of others (see the  series of instructables on duct tape wallets) and to research ways to do something.
Make Magazine’s site is a techie’s dream.  However, you shouldn’t let that bother you, as there are far too many interesting sights and sounds on this fantastic website.  Personally, I’m a huge fan of their videocasts where they feature a “maker” who professionally creates art or technology.  Here are good examples of their videocast, their TV show and a sample article :

• Sneaky uses for magnets
• Smoke Rings, Theremin Orchestra, Pulse-Jet, Beer on CSPAN
• Kid’s race car from scratch

Another feature of Make worth investigating is the MakerShed where you can purchase kits for all sorts of projects.  I’ve got my eye on a couple of the little robot kits for beginners, as it seems like a fun Saturday activity.

Make writers also post their own projects on Instructables (maybe the ones that didn’t “make” the cut – sorry).

At the end of the day, both of these sites can provide both entertainment and useful information.  If you’re planning a home improvement project or something wacky, try out Instructables first. If you’re planning on building a robot (or simply want to watch other’s creations) visit Make.  Either way, you’re bound to find a weekend project.

Enjoy,

~ab

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 7:52 pm and is filed under DIY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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