The Talik

It’s been a while since I’ve done any engineering/DIY posts so today I’ll change that and show you how to make your very own MacBook Pro stand.

Here are the materials you will need: (1)1.5×1.5 foot sheets .25inch of Acrylic (2)Acrylic glue (3)Table saw (4)sandpaper. First start by getting out you acrylic sheets and marking where you need cut. Here are the dimensions for the various pieces: After marking down the lines on the acrylic it’s time to visit the table saw. This is by far the hardest and most dangerous step in constructing the stand, but with a little common sense you should be fine. Obviously one of the most important parts of the saw is the blade. Websites that I have read suggest that you use a carbide tipped blade with ~ 5 teeth/inch. Despite this suggestion I ended up just using a normal carbide blade with ~ 2 teeth/inch and everything turned out fine (just had to do a little more sanding). Most of the parts are pretty simple to cut except the legs. To compensate for this I made a simple jig that allowed me to make the cut. After cutting all the pieces it is time to sand the edges so they can be glued. To do that I suggest starting out with fairly rough sandpaper, something around 50 grit should work. From there move to 100 grit and finished it all of with 320 grit paper. The final step is to get everything glued together. Because this was my first time I used a general acrylic glue made for aquariums. It’s more forgiving and easier to work with in my opinion, however it doesn’t look as good nor is it as strong as glues that actually melt the acrylic pieces together. So after you have decided which type of glue to use just put all of the parts together according to my diagram, let the glue dry, and you’re done!!!

Though the stand has a old G4 PowerBook on it the stand was actually made to fit my MacBook Pro which I got soon after.

Hope you enjoy your Stand!!!

More pictures…

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Hey all, this is just a quick post to keep you all entertained while I prepare more in depth posts.

Last year I took a little weekend trip to Fermilab with my school. Needless to say it was pretty cool. We got to see a lot of the equipment that makes the lab run as well as a bunch of free swag. Here are some pictures from the trip…

more pictures…

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So I just read about this company called Rotoblock. The company is basaed in Santa Rosa California and is working on a type of engine called a toroidal internal combustion engine. The torodial engine made by Rotoblock is an evolution of the oscillating piston engine (O.P.E) designed by Dr. Monti Farrell.

As skeptical as I am that any of the large auto manufactures will adopt the revolutionary engine I can’t help but root for the small company.

The O.P.E seems a promising alternative to traditional reciprocating piston engines mainly because of it’s increased power to wight ratio.Given that Mazda has been using Wankel engines for some time now maybe their is some hope for Rotoblock.

How ever it turns out it’s always great to see innovation alive and well.

read more…

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So in an effort to get back into this whole blogging ordeal I’m going to start of with a nice interesting post.Over winter break my brother, mom, and I decided to organize our Lego collection. At the end of the tedious process of assembling and finding the various legos I took a few pictures with my camera and the awesome tripod from my aunt and uncle this christmas.Without further adieu:

more lego pictures…

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Those of you who haven’t seen Spinal Tap may not to apreciate this find to its full extent, but I recently stumbled upon this dial at school. The special thing about it of course is that the numbers don’t just stop at ten, no no they go all the way up to eleven. So I brought my camera back a few days later and got a picture of it. The dial is on a table and it must have something to do with audio but I don’t understand why it’s mounted on a table, any ideas? Pretty cool though Watch the Clip

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Here is a video some friends and I made for school. It’s the fictional 15th episode of a 14 episode movie/series that we watched in spanish class.-about La Catrina

Watch the video (27mb ipod format)

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This is just a picture that I took of a remote that my grandpa has. I’ve never seen a tv remote with so few buttons, kinda made me think of the Apple remote for Front Row.

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I don’t know how many of you know this or not but I never heard of it before but it’s a neat little trick using the Dictionary app in tiger. If you select a word and press command-control-D you can see the words definition. It works with applications like safri and mail and some others. Pretty cool, so what does talik mean…?

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