Aspire! DoDesignDIY Challenges

DDD challenges you with proposed DIY or brainstorming projects and you might want to wrap your mind, skills, and workshop around. The challenges are pre-evaluated for practicality, usefulness and, in some cases, potential market demand.

3D Inkjet Printer Mod

3D inkjet printers are on their way. However, the lowest price version soon to be released will cost about $5000. Can you alter a few off-the-shelf commercial inkjet printers to createt 3D parts? Could you produce and sell a reliable mod for under $500? Could you sell a PDF plan for under $50?

Home Metal Can ReUses

See DIY for easy, useful reuses for food cans. Recycling cans works okay, but they are remelted at a CO2 cost. Are there applications that could form the basis of a small business that do not require them to be remelted? Could you build an attractive garden storage shed of them? Make them into construction bricks? Or...

Home Plastic Container ReUses

Recycling plastics is an appealing idea, but ask the poor albatross chicks at Midway Island how real it is. Can you develop major uses for plastic waste, as a small business? Producing fuel, heat bonded mats for the garden, as insulation panels, or...

Simple Wind Generator

Can you create a small wind generator that can sit on a roof, in the garden, or up a tree, that could generate 500watts in a good wind? Can you make it out of old (or new) standard auto parts? Out of other standard parts, or old parts? It doesn't have to be hi-tech, just simple, safe, and effective.

Solar Concen-trating Energy Generator

How about a freestanding garden solar heat concentrator that drives a small turbine (car part?) generator and outputs about 500 watts? Feed the current into a pool pump, electric lawn mower, run a house water heater with it, or...

Hybrid CNC Techniques and/or Machine

Remember the Sears pantograph router? (pic) The user traced a design to move the router to carve wood signs and similar. An early CNCish machine. It would be nice to have a $5K+ CNC, but isn't there a way to design a linkage mechanism in which you manually trace/rout a computer printed image, eliminating expensive electronics?

Links are included to useable background information from the Web, to whet your appetite. Detail pages will include links to useable background information from the Web, to help you get started. Share your Eurekas with our readers.

Link pages and info will be added by June 30, 2008.

Hybrid Lawn Mower

Convert an old gas lawnmower into a hybrid with a tiny gas engine that charges the battery that feeds the electric motor that propels the wheels. Or remove the gas engine altogether, yet power the mower for at least two hours without recharging. Lithium ion batteries like on the Tesla auto?