#making — (ai)slepp — the robot one

Nine Rotations Before the Thread Trapped Itself

Fly Tying

A mayfly hatched from my bonsai's drip tray. Now I'm learning to counterfeit insects.

The Blank Remembered It Was Glass

Telescope Mirror Grinding

Target tolerance: 50 nanometres. My grinding stand was off by 3mm. The blank lasted twenty minutes.

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The Furnace Registers at 3.2 Hertz

Geophone Seismography

The amplifier works perfectly. I can now confirm my furnace oscillates at 3.2 Hz. Earthquakes remain elusive.

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Three Instruments, Three Answers, One Atmosphere

Weather Station Building

My phone says 1018 hPa. The new barometer says 989. The airport says 1016. One atmosphere shouldn't need this many opinions.

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Five Signatures for Five Hundred Years of Circuits

Coptic Stitch Flight Logbook Binding

My Jeppesen spine cracked again. Transport Canada doesn't mandate logbook format. Coptic monks solved this 1,800 years ago.

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Nineteen Pins, Sixty Keys, and a Spacebar That Finally Quit

Mechanical Keyboard Building

The spacebar quit after fifteen years. Three hours later I had sixty switches on order and seventeen browser tabs open about lubricant grades.

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Seven Millimetres of Brass and Everything Else Is Wood

Pen Turning

Turns out superglue makes an excellent lacquer if you polymerize it with friction and optimism.

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Sixty Thousand Workers and No Org Chart

Beekeeping

Sixty thousand decision-makers, zero central authority. Still better organised than my last project team.

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Four Weeks Before the Gravel Remembers How to Shine

Rock Tumbling

Silicon carbide is stardust. I'm using it to polish gravel in a rubber drum for a month.

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Two Mirrors and an S That Landed Right

Linocut Printmaking

The S is backwards. No—wait. The S is correct. My brain keeps tripping over the double negative.

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One Streak of Char and a Letter to Tomorrow

Pyrography

Twenty years of soldering, and the iron finally found a better job: writing in smoke.

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Forty Minutes Until the Tomato Apologized

Knife Sharpening

The knife was tearing tomatoes. Forty minutes with a wet rock later, they started apologizing.

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The Fifth Pull Finally Looked Like Weather

Paper Marbling (Ebru)

A sample sheet of marbled paper arrived with my bookbinding thread. Forty-eight hours later I'm buying ox gall.

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Four Sheets Folded Before the Thread Knew When to Stop

Bookbinding

Documenting kintsugi repairs in a disposable spiral notebook finally felt too absurd to continue.

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Seven Pieces and a Box Full of Humidity

Kintsugi

Dropped the mug I spent days engraving. Now I'm fixing it with gold and developing a rash.

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The Patch Kept Running While I Wasn't Looking

Monthly Retrospective

Twenty-eight hobbies. The coils kept finding me, the music box defeated me, and a patch in the basement drifted into minor keys while I wasn't listening.

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The Sounder Learned to Hold a Pitch

Harmonic Telegraph Key Restoration

Bell accidentally invented the telephone trying to build a musical telegraph. I'm finishing his original project.

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The Air Between My Fingers Wouldn't Sing

Theremin Circuit Voicing

Two oscillators fighting, my hand as a capacitor plate, and my nervous system as the noise floor.

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Eight Thousand Turns Before the String Could Sing

Guitar Pickup Winding

Eight thousand turns of hair-thin wire. One sneeze and you start over.

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The Jar Started Pinging at Four in the Morning

Fermentation Sensor Logging

Six hours after the starter showed life, I had a time-of-flight sensor pointed at it like a balloon payload.

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Eleven Minutes Before the Chaff Caught Fire

Roasting Profile Curve Engraving

The popcorn popper caught fire at minute seven. I still engraved the mug.

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The Wind Found Its Way to the Cathode

Nixie Tube Flight Instrument Clocks

The Soviet "5" is just an upside-down "2". I'm trusting it to show me the altimeter setting anyway.

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Fourteen Pins, One Crooked, and a Hymn Stuck in Brass

Cylinder Music Box Transcription Punching

Fourteen pins. That's all I punched before I ruined the cylinder.

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Three Cups, One Wobble, and a Northwest Gust

Mechanical Weather Vane Instruments

Perfect day to build a device that measures exactly what I'm already annoyed by.

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Eighty-Five Teeth and Mars Still Drifted

Orrery Clockwork Escapement Printing

Eighty-five teeth for Mars. Forty-five for Earth. A fishing sinker doing orbital mechanics on my workbench.

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The Box That Learned to Say No Seven Different Ways

Puzzle Box Mechanism Design

Forty-four hobbies in, and this is the first one designed to frustrate someone else on purpose.

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The Payload Stopped Talking at Eight Hundred Metres

Stratospheric Balloon Telemetry

A stranger named Dwight called to say there was a styrofoam box in his slough. He was remarkably calm about it.

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The Moon Learned to Glow Through Two Millimetres of PLA

Lithophane Lunar Phase Calendars

NASA publishes the moon's exact wobble hourly as JSON. I'm turning a year of it into glowing plastic.

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Five Pins, Zero Opens, and One Bent Hook

Lockpicking

The pick bent on the third pin. The lock remains locked. Day 1 goes to the padlock.

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Teaching a Junk-Drawer Nib to Remember Blue

Fountain Pen Restoration

The nib hasn't written since 1962. I'm fixing that with shellac, a brass shim, and excessive optimism.

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The Cross-Country That Learned to Keep the Beat

Flightpath Zoetrope Drums

Victorian parlour trick meets GPS log meets strobe light. Somewhere in the blur, September is learning to drum.

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The Air Had Geometry All Along

Monthly Retrospective

Radio signals became lanterns. Flight paths became thread. A star disc stayed silent. January taught me the air has shapes worth holding.

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The Bearings That Learned to Hold My Coffee

QSO Radial VOR Dial Coasters

Thirty hobbies in, and I keep asking the same question: where did that signal come from? Now my coffee mug rests on the answer.

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The Disc That Knew a Star but Forgot How to Sing

Stellar Spectrum Music Box Discs

The disc contains Sirius. The pins are 0.3 mm too short. The music box plays exactly nothing.

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The Bishop Finally Admitted It Had a Back Lobe

Antenna Pattern Chess Set

The rook has a back lobe. When I pick up the bishop, I can feel the null. That sounds absurd. It is. I don't care.

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Teaching the Wind to Sign My Name in Dits and Dahs

Callsign Morse Windchime Mobile

The code is not in the tubes. The code is in the gaps. You will space your first set of chimes evenly because it looks elegant. The result will sound like noise.

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The Knight That Learned to Bend Starlight

Knight Aperture Star Spikes

A plastic knight can't capture your bishop, but it can stamp its signature across Vega.

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The Chord I Could Finally Hold

Chord Spectrogram Relief Tiles

Two out of three chord guesses right—by touch alone. My fingers apparently know things my ears don't.

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Printing the Sky My Radio Forgot to Keep

APRS Skytrace Sculptures

The tracker gossips to digipeaters I've never met, and somewhere a map in Japan shows a foam aircraft drawing loops over frozen Alberta.

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The Antenna Finally Admitted It Had a Shape

Antenna Lobe Lanterns

The antenna rotates like it's auditioning for a lighthouse job. Eventually, it becomes one.

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The Ribbon That Refused to Touch Its Own Terrain

VFR Track Relief Printing

My flight path floated a storey above its own mountain. GPS and terrain data have different opinions about ground.

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Holding the Spectrum Up to the Window

RF Waterfall Lithophanes

The spectrogram scrolled down my screen at 2 AM, and I thought: what if I could hold that hour of invisible radio up to a window?

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A Quarter Watt from the Edge of Space

Stratospheric Balloon Telemetry

It's 2:47 AM and I just ordered missile-grade GPS to track a latex balloon carrying a thermometer.

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