Artist hand-stitched a dress entirely from preserved autumn leaves

Boing Boing: An artist named Amanda Meyer created an incredible dress out of autumn leaves. Meyer soaked the leaves in a glycerin solution to preserve them — glycerin replaces the water inside each leaf, keeping it pliable and colorful rather than letting it dry out and crumble — and then hand-stitched them all together. It took her 30 hours to complete.

Understanding Grain Direction in Sheet Metal

www.protocase.com: Engineers and designers often choose a powder coat finish for their custom enclosures and parts because it provides a bright, vibrant and professional look. But what if you don’t need to have your enclosures or parts painted but still need them to be aesthetically pleasing?

Custom Exhibit Fabrication Process: Sketch To Show Floor

exhibitstudios.com: Behind every successful exhibit is more than a great design. The custom exhibit fabrication process is where precise craftsmanship, structural engineering, and strategic production planning transform concepts into show-ready environments.

Traits that make a fab shop employee stand out

www.thefabricator.com: What makes a good shop employee? That’s a question that sounds simple on the surface, but if you’ve spent any amount of time in a fabrication shop, you know there’s a lot more to it than just showing up and punching a clock. Every shop may have its own flavor, with different equipment, products, and expectations, but for the most part, we’re all looking for the same core qualities in an employee. You can teach someone how to run a machine, but it’s a lot harder to teach them how to care.

How HMIs and embedded systems are redefining the industrial PC

Control Design: I’ve been in this business for a little shy of 40 years, and I’ve encountered a lot of different hardware and applications during my trips around the sun. It’s been a great experience, and it took me to places literally around the world. When I got to thinking about an industrial PC (IPC), I admit that it took me a while to remember the last time I used one.

Knowing the ins and outs of plasma tube cutting

www.thefabricator.com: Can using plasma to cut your tube and pipe be a better option for your operation than a saw or laser? Quite possibly, but using plasma cutting technology well means knowing what the guardrails are and the latest measures being taken to mitigate one of plasma’s inherent trouble spots.

AI in metal fabrication and the slow evolution of shop-floor technology

www.thefabricator.com: Metal fabrication abounds with new technology that can run circles around older machines. Thing is, when you visit shops, you’ll find that new technology isn’t pervasive. Even at the most progressive fabricators out there, decades-old machines tend to run alongside new systems with 3D touch controls and all the bells and whistles. Some shops survive and even thrive for decades relying mainly on very old machines and paper-based information systems. Why is this, exactly?

Every Type of Plastic Used By LEGO

BrickNerd - All things LEGO and the LEGO fan community: Back in 2022, I wrote an overview of the materials that LEGO uses in their products. Though I’m not a materials expert by any means, I do enjoy researching and discussing LEGO minutiae, and in the years since that article was published, I have found a few more historic sources for materials used, made some corrections, and been pointed towards other resources by like-minded fans.

Five Wide Format Products With Strong Profit Margins

Sign Builder Illustrated, The How-To Sign Industry Magazine: Walk into almost any sign shop today and you will find a wide format printer working away somewhere in the production area. For many shops it’s the backbone of daily work. Banners, yard signs, decals and posters keep the printer busy and the schedule full.

Get Custom CNC Milled Parts in Your Hands in Just Four Days

Modern Applications News – Metalworking Ideas For Today's Job Shop: MISUMI Group's meviy is rewriting the "lead time" timeline with a major upgrade to its Expedite+ service, slashing CNC milling delivery to as few as four days. For engineers and job shops facing last-minute design shifts or broken production lines, this level of speed is a massive competitive advantage.

A bolt hole, a lathe, and the real meaning of transfer in fabrication

www.thefabricator.com: During the last month or so in my work at Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, Ames, Iowa, I’ve twice been tasked with repairing a crack that runs along a bolt hole. These projects got me thinking about the word transfer—how we use it in metal fabrication and how we use it in education.

A part presentation primer for powder coating

www.thefabricator.com: Parts flow from blanking to bending with minimal work-in-process (WIP). It all seems seamless until you walk to your in-line powder coating system. You see WIP everywhere. Parts are hung haphazardly, widely spaced. Even worse, you see someone wielding a Dremel to frantically remove paint from hooks. Evidently, a lack of grounding was creating some adhesion difficulties.

The "Amazon of Metal" Adds Custom Tube Bending to Its Digital Arsenal

Tooling & Production: The traditional bottleneck of metal fabrication -- waiting weeks for a quote only to face steep order minimums -- is being dismantled by OSH Cut. Headquartered in Spanish Fork, Utah, the online manufacturing leader recently announced the launch of instant CNC tube bending services, a move that brings the convenience of e-commerce to precision structural fabrication.

Just a reminder: Making stuff is cool

www.thefabricator.com: There are days in the metal fabricating industry when everything feels normal. You walk in, flip on the lights, hear the hum of machines and the clank of steel, smell of smoke, and you don’t even think twice about it. It’s just what you do. It’s what you’ve always done. Honestly, you get kind of complacent. I’ve caught myself in that mindset more than once. Everything seems to be on autopilot and nothing seems to be as fresh as it used to be.

Creating bend notches the easy way

www.thefabricator.com: The incorporation of sheet metal in a product presents numerous design-for-manufacturing opportunities. Those in flatwork trades know about standards—for gauges of thickness, tempers of alloys, best practices in radii, tooling access, springback, stress relief, and more.

Introduction to GD&T

Protocase Blog: Manufactured pieces can differ in size and dimensions from an original CAD model due to variations in the manufacturing processes. To optimally control and communicate the allowable variations, engineers and manufacturers working under the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) standards, use a symbolic language called Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T).

Makera Carvera Air Makes Milling a Breeze

Make:: Matt Stultz reviewed the middle of Makera’s lineup, the Carvera Air, when it first came out in 2024. Since then we’ve spent some time on a production machine and come to appreciate even more what Makera has done to make CNC milling easier.

The enduring use of pneumatic grippers

www.motioncontroltips.com: Mechanical jaw grippers driven pneumatically or electrically are indispensable and ubiquitous. These include parallel grippers, three-finger grippers, and angled-finger grippers. Permanent-magnet and electromagnet-based end effectors handle ferrous parts for the machine-tool industry.

Fusion Community Spotlight: From Traditional Machinist to Modern Shop – Adam Booth’s Fusion CNC Journey

Fusion Blog: Adam Booth here, though some of you may know me online as Abom79. I’m a third‑generation machinist based in Pensacola, Florida, and the owner of a small but mighty job shop where old‑school manual machining and modern CNC live under the same roof. My work today combines repair and job‑shop projects, CNC production, product development, and educational content

Thermoforming: Shaping Curvy Grilles With No Supports

Hackaday: Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire or hot air, thermoplastics like PLA can be further tweaked with a similar method.