When did protective eyewear get so sexy? I haven’t purchased a pair in fifteen years; now in the market for a new pair of safety glasses, I stumbled across Uvex’s Pheos, above. The things practically look like they were designed by Oakley; I wonder if they took they step of bonding the one-piece lens to the hinges because it confers some structural benefit, or simply because it looks cool.
On a more functional front, Uvex recently released their AcoustiMaxx model, which features stereo Bluetooth earbuds. For shop guys that need to constantly field phone calls, I guess this is the hands-free way to go. I’m not sure how good the system is at filtering out machine noise, but the company claims to deliver “crystal clear, acoustically-isolated in-ear voice communication through its dual microphone technology.”
Surgical work requires a level or hand precision artisans would envy but years of repetitive motion can leave doctors with various levels of carpal tunnel. Enter the Stratos™, a new all-in-one device for endoscopic carpal tunnel release. Among a number of innovations, the Stratos™ handle houses scraper and blade attachments which are automatically deployed with a flip of a switch. Consider that many surgeries take hours on end, this new tool enables doctors to do their job without tiring out their wrists and hands. Need more of this!
Designers: A.M. Surgical, Inc. & Carbon Design Group
I was impressed when I first saw furniture designer George Berry, a/k/a “The Wood Guy” demonstrate how to cut a circle out using a table saw. (It’s an oldie but a goodie, we’ll embed it at the bottom.) But I’ve just witnessed something far crazier: A guy cutting out a wooden sphere using a circular saw.
Izzy Swan is a retired furniture shop owner who now spends his days designing and building contraptions for fun. One such contraption is what you’re about to see. “With a little redneck ingenuity,” Swan writes, “I built this simple jig that turned my circular saw in to a ball making machine!”
There are two looks at how he did it. The first is artistic…
Don’t let the nickname fool you: Cleo “Whimpy” Hogan is a retired U.S. Army Major and combat veteran with two tours of duty under his belt. But since the 1990s, Kentucky-based Hogan has been involved in the agribusiness of beekeeping, and currently raises both Italian and Russian honeybees in such numbers that he can generate 160 gallons of honey in a single harvest.
Hogan sells not only the honey, but also the bees. To keep costs down he makes his own beehives, which are fairly straightforward woodworking projects that can be done with conventional tools; but one thing that previously stymied him was how to do the cove cut required for a concave, parabola-shaped handle.
Hogan and his pal Lawrence Bartley figured out how to do it, using just a circular saw and a simple jig:
Obviously you’re not going to want to do this with your favorite circular saw, but here’s the perfect app for that swap-meet Skilsaw gathering dust in the garage. And while any of you ID students oughta be able to reverse-engineer the jig just by watching the video, Hogan will send the plans to fellow beekeepers free of charge. His e-mail address is cchoganjr [at] scrtc -dot- com.
Hold on to your Dunnys and Munnys, design fans, because Kidrobot founder Paul Budnitz is making time in his new life as a maker of beautiful bicycles to guide Smorkin’ Labbit lovers–and anyone else who is interested–through the process of creating a great designer toy. Budnitz has signed on to teach “Beautiful Plastic: Creating a Great Designer Toy,” an online course that launches October 16 through Skillshare.
“The goal of the class is to help artists sketch their own toy,” Budnitz tells us. “I talk about the basic history of designer toys, since it’s important to know the medium in which you’re working. There’s also a discussion about appropriation and juxtaposition, two elements of design that are found in most good art (and toys), and some ideas of how to apply this to your own toy.” And of course, he’ll offer plenty of pointers on how to design and draw a toy, with an eye to getting it off the page and into into production. continued…
“I have a bit of an obsession with stationery. I am almost fanatical about choice of paper, notebook, writing implements. It’s getting out of hand. You’re always searching for the perfect writing implement and I think I’ve finally found it. It’s the rOtring Tikky Graphic, a German pen. I buy these by the dozen because I am afraid they might stop making them. It’s for me the perfect writing implement.”
As industrial designers, a lot of us dream of having product design hits, where we design something so popular that those royalty checks start piling up. But the obstacles are manifold. To sell units in the thousands you’ve got to find a deep-pocketed manufacturer to sign on, unless you’re able to front the tooling costs yourself, you’ve got to hope that the raw materials supply, marketing and distribution all work out, and of course you’ve got to design something that thousands of people really want or need in the first place.
Ron Paulk not only has a bona fide design hit on his hands with the Paulk Workbench, but has also neatly sidestepped all of those obstacles we just mentioned. The factory is actually the end-user, and by all accounts they’re happy to build the product themselves. Perhaps the most amazing part is that the marketing of it has all happened completely by accident. It is an absolute best-case product design scenario: Ron designed and built the workbench for his own personal use, then discovered there was demand—mass demand—for his design, and figured out a way to distribute it. Ron tells us the story below.
As he mentions towards the end of the video, in addition to selling plans for the Paulk Workbench, Ron is also selling plans for his Miter Stand (a standalone item) and his Cross-Cut Jig (which attaches to the Paulk Workbench).
Selling blueprints to a DIY project is nothing new; hobbyist magazines have had little ads in the back of them for decades. But with YouTube taking care of the marketing, the internet taking care of the distribution, the end-users themselves taking care of the materials supply and fabrication, and with Ron himself handling the most important element, the clever design, Paulk has pointed the way towards a potential product design future—one that’s much more hands-on than 3D printing—that I could not have imagined when I was back in design school.
3D-printed guitars, food, and fashion will be displayed and discussed at Mediabistro’s Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo next week, September 17-18 in San Jose, California. Join us there and network with leaders in the Silicon Valley tech community.
Design-oriented sessions include “Tools of Creation” and “The Future of Retail and Materials for 3D Printing,” which will be led by Isaac Katz of Electronic Art Boutique and David L. Bourell of Laboratory for Freeform Fabrication. continued…
The average person doesn’t keep construction goggles or a shop-vac handy, so it’s likely that you know just how irritating it can be to have dust and debris flying all over the place (especially in your eyes) when you’re using a drill! This ingenious device called the Motorless Vacuum uses the drills own rotational power to move the internal fan and create suction which draws dust into the reservoir. After you’re finished drilling, just remove the peripheral and dump the sawdust!
Helpful as the likes of Weather.com and WeatherBug may be, they rarely offer clear answers to practical climate-related queries: Should you wear a jacket? Bring along a sweater? Take the umbrella? Douse yourself in sunblock? Ditch the text-only forecast in favor of Swackett, a visual weather report peopled with symbols (“peeps”) dressed for the up-to-the-minute conditions—and extended forecasts—in the city of your choice. The cheeky app, available for assorted smartphone platforms as well as the plain ‘ol web, also includes weather photography, radar imagery, and severe weather watches and warnings, so you’ll know whether it’s time to batten down the hatches or grab your sunglasses.
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3D-printed guitars, food, and fashion will be displayed and discussed at Mediabistro’s 
