Custom Figure Display, Part 2

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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“HiFi” on the cheaps, DIY Speakers for few euros…

As a friend and myself built me a pair of quite nice – not to say wowzie – speakers for music production and DJing a few years ago i was now eager to try myself. To get the basic idea of craftsmenship and woodworking i started not by developing the speakers myself – as it was done by my friend for me back then – but go for a well known design by a guy from the german Hifi-Forum: The TenÖre Transmissionline Broadband-speaker. The name comes from german dialect/puns and roughly means “10-euro thingy”. A perfect object to train the techniques needed for more complicated work…

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Mahjongg madness, DIY Mahjongg table

Okay, so what do we have here? As you may know from previous posts or the tag-cloud we are quite into the game of Mahjongg, playing Riichi rules. What we’ve been missing all the time was a fantastic automatic mahjongg table. Of course it is much too expensive and huge – on top of that those beasts of machanics engeneering need frequend service – which isn’t available in Europe (it seems like this one was a rumor and is not true for the ones linked above…). So we set out to build one Ourselves (of course no automatic one as we are no team of engeneers with a fully equipped work shop). Read on for details and building instructions.

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Kawaii gifts, n-th round: Bath-Towel

“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy writes

Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta;  use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat;

Or so it goes on…

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

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Deer me, Deer you, Bookstand-Deer!

And off we go for another nice DIY tinkering howto. Again we needed a birthday present for a friend of ours, which is a deliberate Otaku and IRC-Nerd on #satf, rizon. Those folks happen to have a bot that can draw ASCII-Art pictures mainly of deers – that look just like the bookholder deer below.

As you can imagine our friend was flabbergasted (i somehow like that word) to the last. Read on for more details on how to build it!

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Mina, Model-Kit Diary

As figures are somehow fun and so is tinkering. So how about combining those two? “Garage Modelkits” offer you the (IMO) nicest way of doing so. What you’ll get is a resin casted model in parts, you’ve gotta file it, grind it, polish it, paint it and glue it together. It takes up shitloads of your time, so be careful not to let that new hobby eat too much of your time – if you decide to try it / stick with it.

Anyways, we’ve (as in Eefi and NebuK :P) tried our first garage kit, Mina, from the Densha Otoko opening:

Mina, our first modelkit, finished 😛

As we’ve run into many problems, gear and methode wise, we thought we’d publish a small “buildlog” or “modelkit diary”. Mind you, this is by no means a guide or tutorial as we’ve only tried to find our way into the Resin Kit World :P. Still if you’re preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you’re diving into.

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Something green for your flat

You may have some dark or darker places in your Flat/Room/House/Whatever – or – as i do – a complete souterrain flat. Now you may have tried having some indoor plants in there – just to make the rooms nicer. It just didn’t work, so you put ’em into trash and never tried again.

Well, maybe i just exaggerated a bit, it isn’t that worse most of the time. Still its kinda difficult growing and hatching nice plants virtually anywhere. As i like some green around me and *am* living in a dark souterrain flat i’ve put some reading and discussion with biologists into this and i think i’ve got it how to make that work by now.

First off you need to choose the right plants. Not anything is suited for this kind of enviroment, but some nice ones are spathiphyllum, ficus (benjamini), yuca, phoenix (dactylifera), calathea, dracaena, various ivys, but there are many many more. Just check your local library for nice books on that topic – believe me, books are way better than interweb for this :).

Of those examples i have the following ones around:

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Bookbinding is fun!

As i sometimes like to tinker on stuff that i totally don’t know about. This time it was bookbinding. Turnes out its easier than you might think. All you might want is some basic garage workshop material you probably already have at home, some glue, your PDF to print and some time – only about a hour. It’s really fun, really easy and the results are great.

So, please come in and read the actual Article/Tutorial :P.

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Nyamo~~ nya nya fuwaaa~ Plushie

Plushie-time again, it is!

This is one of the awaited chrismas present tutorials, a gift we’ve made for a good friend who happens to like everything thats cat-ish, especially – of course – if it has its origins in otaku-culture, like this:

Nyamo and Miyuki (figure)
Nyamo and Miyuki (figure)

We decided to give a Nyamo (the small catish thingy) a try and make it. As a base we used the well known Poring Plushie pattern, attached ears and tail, cut the right face and swoosh, there it was. But step for step for now…

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