tinkering

Say hi to the KanojoFrame!

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Hi and welcome to a new full fledged (i at least hope so) tutorial to hack together a fast-switch picture frame, our so-called “KanojoFrame”. As i must admit the idea is not fully genuinely ours, we designed and built it with the moo-frame from the excellent business-card supplier moo.com: Moo Mosaic-Frame.

The idea is to have a frame thats front glass plate is dismount- and mountable in the glimpse of a eye thus allowing to change the contents without too much of a hassle. The other aspect is that the whole content of the frame is made up of a mosaic of mini-pictures framed by small but thick cardboard frames. You can then use cardboard spacer to lay the small framed image-“cards” (moo.com are half business cards, ours are roughly creditcard-size) out in every way you want to create a nice compilation of the works displayed!

The frame itself is quite flat, 6mm without glass, rougly 8.5mm with the glass front attached. The glass it held by a couple of strong rare-earth magnets and sits very tight, so no worries about falling glass. The inner frame can hold around 7*3(=21) of our cardboard-mini-frames, but … see for yourself! And if you feel like it, make one yourself….

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New HiFirama, Black Beauty

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Yay for another cool HiFi Project – a mini-monitor using the MarkAudio “cheapo Series”, CHR-70 which benifits from the design- and production experience MarkAudio has from it’s larger brothers but is made with budget considerations in mind – so in short it’s a modern, well-designed and manufactured “mid-budget” speaker which performs just great! The cases are Teak-veneered MDF, the design is a GHP (“Geschlossen mit HochPass” -> Closed with HighPass Cap) design from a HiFi-Forum (german board) member which was influenced by the “GHP” concept of a german HiFi-magazine…

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Nicely lit DIY Figure-Display-Cabinets

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A common problem with most of the figure display case solutions out there is lighting – how do you put enough (and nice) light in your display so the figures look good but the whole place doesn’t get filled by bulky bulbs, PSUs, cables and the like.  We like to show a method of building cheap yet good looking lighting for custom glass displays as well as the common and popular IKEA DETOLF using inexpensive led-strips.

Also, as we (and probably many many others) like to use plain glass shelfs (as they’re easy to mount and look good) to display figures there is the very common problem of dust and dirty laying down on the figures. The other thing we propose here is a nice method to build sturdy yet good looking glass cover you can simply place on the shelf over the figures (a box with two open sides: backside and bottom).

For building and setup instructions for those two cool concepts, please look inside :).

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Backlit Couch/Coffee-Table

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Have you ever wanted a cool couch- or coffee-table? Something you’re friends will be like “wow”, that blends nicely into your existing room and that makes a nice comfy atmosphere?  Too bad something like that isn’t available readily made at IKEA or the like … but hey, we can tinker it together ourselves!

That’s what we thought when we started to plan that table. Another nice thing about it: It’s extensible, you can always mod in a LED matrix and a matrix-cabinet and start displaying pixel art, a ticker or whatever you feel like … but first you need the basic hardware, and thats what this post is about!

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Exclusive Gold/Silver Origami Cases

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And it is (or rather, was) chrismastime again. And what do people like us do that time of the year? Right, tinkering together gifts in raw quantities! This time it got to be small origami figures, plated with real leaf-gold and leaf-silver: A nice selfmade gift with a exclusive note to it. And this is a small introduction (i wouldn’t say tutorial for the sake of the posts detail level) on how to make them. Read on!

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DIY HiFi Surround, picturama

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Once again i’ve been tinkering on small a broadband system to be used as my surround front/rear speakers. I’ve chosen a simple (and cheap!) design very similar to the CT 242, the only thing i’ve changed is the bass-reflex tuning. Once again, as i’m quite new to all this i’d rather refrain from giving instructions on how to do this and that here.

Custom Figure Display, Part 2

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Heyyas there,

here comes part two of the “custom modelkit/figure display” series (or whatever you’d call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever – you name it! It’s a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don’t collect too much dust. This time – unfortuneatly – i don’t have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.

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Custom Figure-Displays, Part I: Rakka Picture Frame

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There are days where you just have to do some handicraft to finish the day in a nice way – so was today (and yesterday, but yesterday nothing worked, so fu yesterday, today worked out nice!). What we did is a – specifically our first – custom figure display. Its a kind of picture frame for a Rakka which lies cozily on a feather-bed.

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Alto II – DIY HiFi getting more serious!

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After i managed to write up the guide/documentation for the cheapo-tenöre yesterday i today want to post more of DIY speaker sweetness – a “Alto II (Variation)” – again a self-developed speaker by a HiFi-Forum member. It is – as you can see – a large floorstander with two Visaton chassis and the second speaker i ever built.

This is – by the way – not going to be a guide, as there are people who can do this far better than me with those more advanced speakers. Time comes, maybe sometime i’ll develop nice speakers myself 🙂 At least thats the plan. But for a picture-documentation – please read on!

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