In an act of delicious over kill, these guys threw a pizza into an industrial laser cutter. The result? Exactly what you would expect. Smoke, giggles and perfectly cut pizza. It looks like the cheese stuck together a bit after the laser cut, but that happens with normal pizza cutters too.
[via DVICE]

MightyOhm's laboratories have recently decided to start tackling more surface mount work. As part of this upgrade to SMD hot air reflow stations, they're handling a lot of solder paste. Solder paste is happy at less than 50degF and above freezing, and [Jeff] didn't want to chance that lead infiltrating his Manwich, so he built this solder paste fridge. The main unit is a standard 12V peltier based travel cooler. He attached a surplus PID controller with a K-type thermocouple to maintain the temperature while preventing the cooler from being always on. The only adjustment he really had to make was adding a bleed resistor to force the MOSFET to turn off. You can find more pictures of his project on Flickr.

[yellowduck] took some fantastic initiative with this home made PCB drill press. Many people have a rotary tool already. Just add some scrap wood and four hinges. The drill press isn't perfect; it pivots a little as it lowers. This shouldn't be a problem for drilling printed circuit boards though. The PCB should be thin enough for the pivot to have little effect. After some test runs, he added a lamp for better lighting and intends to add a return spring and foot switch. It's definitely a better solution than drilling multiple holes with a hand drill.

While not very technical, [3eff_Jeff] posted an interesting modification to an empty air canister that makes it refillable. He was tired of drilling holes in the ozone, so he carefully drilled a hole into the top of the can instead. In the name of caution, he made sure the can was completely empty first by tying the trigger down with a rubber band. After waiting a while he carefully drilled the hole using an oil lubricant, and then epoxied in a Schrader valve from a leftover bike tire tube.

Due to compression of the air as it is pumped into the can, it becomes quite warm. He found that if the can is allowed to cool to room temperature, the air would become very cold once leaving the canister, which would cause condensation problems. So he uses it right after filling, and then empties it out when not in use.

We do not recommend anyone trying this, but it is a unique way to make a commonly used disposable resource in the computer field reusable. If we can use something more than once, we're definitely for it. That's why we support recycling components that would otherwise make their way to the landfill.

Gun issues aside, [Justin]'s been CNC milling his own gun parts for quite a while. We've been a fan of his work simply because of the technical challenge that this sort of milling presents. Even if you're anti-gun, you should check out the work he's been turning out. Pictured is one of his early projects: a 92fs Beretta frame in the process of being milled from a solid block of aluminum. Our friend the gun nut is insanely jealous of his AR45 lower project.

We've lost track of the number of home built CNC machines we've covered in the past, but we thought a comprehensive list of the best would help you understand why we're so excited about the LumenLab CNC machine.

[Scott] sent in his video how-to on surface mount soldering. The macro video quality is excellent, and the demo is great even if you're already into SMD work. Everything can be done with fine solder, a decent soldering station, tweezers, a 10x loupe and a good selection of flux. I've managed quite a bit of SMD work without external flux, but this sort of demo shows just how effective it is.

[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It's a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting - I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.

[Barry] sent in his writeup and video about a serious vulnerability in the AXA bike lock. (One of the most popular locks in the Netherlands.) It turns out that quite a few of them can be opened with a blank key. [Barry] demo's the hack, and has some comments about the lame efforts of the manufacturer. If you enjoy interesting reading, check out his blog covering lock picking and physical security.

This will probably be more useful to custom speaker builders, but coil winding has always been a bit tedious. [iwicom] put together a simple coil winder using a hand drill, a magnet, a reed switch that triggers a pedometer. Aside from the coil winder, I love the idea of using the pedometer as a cheap event counter.