Lisa Katayama

An illustrated guide to making t-shirts with the Yudu machine

yudu template.JPG

Remember the screen printing system from the Boing Boing Video episode Mark and I shot at Maker Faire, the Yudu? Well, I wanted to make t-shirts for my personal blog, TokyoMango, so I went over to my friend Ben's house this past weekend to do a test run on the one he bought at the Faire. The Yudu, it turns out, is a great compact home printing machine as long as you don't have high expectations and are armed with mountains of patience.

First, Ben mocked up two versions of his design using Adobe Illustrator, one for dark ink and one for light. We printed these out on a vellum transparency using a regular inkjet printer, then put it aside to dry. It took us several attempts to get a perfectly un-smudged transparency, but we finally got one we could work with. (This obviously is no fault of Yudu — it's either the printer ink or the vellum or the compatibility of the two.)

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Next step: prepare the screen. We put emulsion on the screen in a darkened room through a wet-and-stick-and-dry process to get it ready for exposure. We wet the screen with a spray bottle and then squeegeed the excess off. Then we put the screen on a drying rack in the Yudu machine. The drying is supposed to take 20 minutes, but we found it took a good hour of manual hairdryer heat in addition to the preset drying cycle. While we waited, we ate pizza and wings and playing Rock Band.

In earlier test runs with the Yudu, Ben claimed he had nightmarish troubles getting it to just the right wetness — the tutorials warn against making it too wet, but too dry was the bigger problem for him, leaving parts of the screen patchy and other parts just completely missing the emulsive layer. (Ben: "It was super annoying and I wanted to kill it.")

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2

Steven Leckart

HOWTO Set Up An Analog TV Station

OMG TV, which bills itself as "the only analog station in NYC," has spent the last two months broadcasting on Channel 14 in New York. So what on Earth are they showing? The station aggregates online video content and then lets viewers vote (online, ha!) on what makes the televised broadcast. Sounds assbackwards, but that's part of the point.

According to the founders:

On the web, so many options create a panic of possibilities. On OMG TV, there is no fast forward button or other videos to distract you. In OMG TV's simplicity you can sit back and watch one video at a time.

The station was created by Jon Cohrs, who also founded the Urban Prospecting movement we wrote about in May. What's particularly cool about the project isn't the content itself, but the fact it shows you could easily do this, too.

Jon created an Instructables guide on how to set up your very own local analog tv station — everything from first finding some "whitespace" to locating a transmitter.

Here's part of Step 1: Find a Free Channel:

Although after the 2009 DTV transition in June a lot of "whitespace"(i.e. unused television bandwidth) became available, most of this whitespace is still legally dubious and many of these channels are still tied to the original owners via legal identity and copyright. However, because of this legal ambiguity a lot of free space is still up for the taking.
The best option for finding free space is the FCC's own search engine for these things

Thanks, FCC!!!

image by georgia.g

1

Steven Leckart

HOWTO Make A Cheap Version of Muji's CD Player

Ariel Schlesinger put together a guide on how to fabricate a cheap, homemade version of the wall-mounted CD player Nato Fukasawa designed for Muji.

Per Ariel's directions, here's everything you need:

a CD-player with an access to the batteries compartment from the front (disc side),
a pair of portable speakers that have a built in amplifier,
a pull cord light switch with a cotton thread,
circle cutting knife. for nice circle cuts.
epoxy glue, cardboard glue and some wires.

Or you could buy the original for $178.

Previously:

11

Steven Leckart

HOWTO Build an Outdoor Pizza Oven

Remember when I modded my conventional kitchen oven with $13.50 worth of ceramic firebricks? In that post, I linked to a variety of outdoor ovens that seemed intriguing, like the Peruvian igloo.

Well, Serious Eats's Slice blog reports on Mark Wilkie, a Brooklynite who spent two months constructing a Pompeii brick oven in his backyard based on plans from Forno Bravo. Mark's posted some great photos documenting the process, including a few fun time-lapses:

If you've got the space, seems well worth the effort.

images by Mark Wilkie

[via Kottke]

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Lisa Katayama

Rigged glasses let ALS patients write with their eyes

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A new device created by a team of graffiti artists and friends enables those who have lost their motor skills to draw with their eyes. The project was inspired by LA graffiti writer Tony Quan's 2003 diagnosis of ALS &mdash Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis &mdash since he still has full control of his mind and his eyes, this enables him to write graffiti from his hospital bed.