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Time to make some stuff

I miss making stuff.

For many years I have gotten a great deal of joy out of making stuff but of late, things have been too hectic and I've been recovering from my nerve injury so I've not actually made anything for some time.

That has to change.

Making stuff is what separates us from the animals. What good is a lifetime of knowledge, experience and skill if it's not applied to the task of making something new, interesting and exciting?

Therefore, I have big plans to get my hands dirty and create something.

I shall be returning to the workshop shortly and having a bit of a spring-clean, in preparation of becoming all buildy and creative again.

The question is -- what shall I make?

I'd kind of like to build an over-unity fusion reactor but I think we all know that that would take 20 years, as it always has. I doubt I'll live that long so we'll scratch that off the list of options eh?

There will definitely be some pulsejet activity -- in fact I've already dusted off my archived notes, plans and tests on the xjet engine that I worked so hard on over quarter of a century ago. Just a little while ago I figured it had probably been superceded by cheap turbojets but now, with the proliferation of "drones" in the theatre of war, a new window has opened up so it's likely the most valuable bit of IP I own right now.

Making loud noises and flooding the atmosphere with CO2 is not something I want to do all-day, every-day so I'm also going to try and make some other stuff.

The great thing is that there are now some really cool new technologies that have become available in recent years and they make it possible for individuals, such as myself, to make things that previously would have been impossible.

3D printing is a great example. My own 3D printer will allow me to knock-up all sorts of plasticy things but now you can get even exotic metals 3D printed in China for a song. If I want a complex shape made in a high-temperature alloy such as Inconel that's no longer a problem, there are Chinese-based companies that will do it for a few hundred bucks -- thousands cheaper than the alternative of having it CNC machined from a billet.

The same goes for electronic projects.

Once upon a time you had to design and build almost everything from scratch but now there are just so many "functional blocks" such as switching regulators, amplifiers, microcontroller boards and such which are all available "off the shelf". Building even the most complex electronic project is now so damned simple that everyone should be doing it.

Need some code for that microcontroller? Just fire up your local LLM and vibe-code baby!

Really, when you stop and think about it, it's never been easier or chaper to build whatever you can imagine.

Right now I'm giddy with options so the next few weeks will likely be spent taking the long list of possibilities I've already identified and whitling it down to two or three good ideas that I'll really get stuck into.

Of course it'll all be open-sourced and I'll make "how to" videos along the way. Hopefully these videos will pay for the bits and keep food on my table over the next six months as well.

If you've got any ideas for something you'd like to see moved into the realm of DIY construction, drop me an email. You know the address... it's "editor" at this domain. If I think it's a great idea I'll do my best to design and build it.

Let the summer of construction commence!

Carpe Diem folks!

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