Take two 250 cc Aermacchi cylinder and heads and connect them to a common crankcase = Linto 500 GP. Such an awesome sounding machine too! I remember reading about this machine in the mid to late 90's when Jill and I were dating. I was reading a Classic Motrocycle magazine from Engand in a Boarders or Barnes and Noble in Champaign, IL. I bought that magazine and still have it. It was the first magazine that I came across that had a motorcycle that loosely resembled the engine layout on my Harley Sprint (Aermacchi) that she had bought me a few years before. It looked so exotic...and it was. This is a super rare machine. It would be fun to try and build a replica of this. Source the parts and cast a custom crankcase and stuff it in a homebuilt frame.
I always have been drawn to this engine/frame combo. There's just something about it. The Linto 500GP was similar and worth looking at if you don't know what it is. Awesome machine.
I understand function over form, but I wish there's a beauty standard for these machines - new machines are so...ugly:
80's Suzuki RG500Γ
The above images and text is from Shingo Furukawa. Shingo brings up a good point. I'm trying to decide if I'm just nostalgic about the older designs because I remember going to the dealership and collecting the various brochures on consumer street bikes (which were based on race bikes like these) and then taking them home and dreaming. I've saved those brochures all these years. I probably dreamed more about works motocross bikes and enduros, but the that's probably because I started off riding dirt rather than street. The MX bikes seemed more attainable too. That's not to say that the street bikes didn't peek my interest though. They seemed exotic to me especially when I would see the race versions in Cycle World. I find myself gravitating to these race and street bikes now and it would be fun to do a restoration on something from this era.
It's true that as an adult you spend your time thinking about the things you couldn't afford when you were a kid. The dreaming continues...
I'm just putting this here because I have some things to think about later. Niel Gershenfeld was a big influence on the orognal Digital Craft Research Lab in Milwaukee. As I prepare to move into my new teaching space, I need think about the words below and think about the gaps.
is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. He’s the founder of a global network of around 3,000 fab labs in 150 countries, chairs the Fab Foundation, and leads the Fab Academy.
It was 20 years ago today … that Dale Dougherty (not Sgt. Pepper) came to play. I’m proud now to have been the first interview in Make:, although I was puzzled at the time. I’d been making things all my life, but didn’t get why that act warranted capitalization, or a magazine, or becoming a noun+verb+adjective. Rereading the interview now, I’d give myself a C for vision, a B for technology, and an A for people.
Vision
This article appeared in Make: Vol 92. Subscribe for more maker projects and articles!
In the interview I mentioned some of the places fab labs had spread to, but didn’t note that each was inspired by another lab opening. That led to exponential growth (as measured by the fablabs.io portal); there are now around 3,000 fab labs in 150 countries; that’s 11.5 doublings over 20 years, a pace that is comparable to Moore’s Law for digital technologies. That trend has come to be called Lass’s Law, after Sherry Lassiter, who leads the Fab Foundation (more on that shortly).
Gordon Moore’s prescient 1965 article that articulated what became Moore’s Law, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” got almost everything right, but missed two important things. The first was duration — he projected 10 years of doubling; it actually began to roll off after 50 years. And he foresaw the positive impacts of digital scaling, but he (along with most everyone else) didn’t anticipate the associated spread of spam, fake news, and income inequality, resulting in consequences we’ve spent years reacting to.
The Make: interview ends by mentioning my upcoming book Fab, which in 2007 celebrated the emerging parallel between personal computing and personal fabrication. It wasn’t until my next book, Designing Reality, in 2017 that I addressed the technological roadmap for 50 years of scaling the performance of digital fabrication, and along with my brothers Joel and Alan looked at how to address barriers and risks now rather than waiting for them to manifest (an updated version will be coming out as an audiobook).
In retrospect, the technological part of that scaling has been the easy part. Much harder has been building the organizational capacity to keep up with it, because empowering anyone to make anything, anywhere, challenges the historical boundaries between work and play, education and industry, formal and informal settings.
To keep up, we’ve had to create a Fab Academy for hands-on technical training which grew into Academany, aka the Academy of Almost Anything after geneticist George Church and colleagues used the platform for a Bio Academy; a Fab City initiative for cities to produce what they consume which began as a 40-year countdown to urban self-sufficiency in Barcelona when Vicente Guallart was the city planner); and a Fab Foundation that’s dedicated to supporting the growth of the fab lab network and its programs, regional capacity-building, the social impact of technology innovation, and my favorite annual event, the FABx gathering that’s rotated among sites around the world.
With the subsequent proliferation of hacker spaces, makerspaces, super labs, mini labs, bio labs … a single count is no longer meaningful as it was in the early days of standardized fab labs. We’ll continue to track the scaling of digital fabrication, but what really matters is its impact, which is why all of these programs are now focused on measuring outcomes.
Technology
The $25k fab lab inventory that I described grew to $100k by the end of what I’ve called the fab 1.0 era of purchasing fab labs. A major addition in response to demand was large-format machining, for making things from furniture up to houses. And at the time of the interview 3D printing was too expensive, proprietary, and immature to include; thanks to pioneers from Adrian Bowyer to Bre Pettis to Josef Prusa to Max Lobovsky it’s now become affordable, reliable, and useful.
In the interview I suggested a fab lab might eventually be able to make another lab. This fab 2.0 era has matured much faster than I expected at the time; machines and their builders including Daniele Ingrassia’s Open Lab Starter Kit, Jens Dyvik’s Fabricatable Machines family, Jake Read’s Clank, and Nadya Peek’s Jubilee are sharing open designs for machines that can compete with their commercial predecessors, while also sharing benefits that include teaching skills, creating work, and easing repair, customization, and reuse.
The democratization of “machines making machines” is leading to both more and less expensive labs. More expensive, through milliondollar- scale super fab labs with more advanced tools able to replace supply chains for many of the components that go into those machines. And less expensive, through few-thousand-dollar minilabs based on commoditized production from open designs. It’s also expanding the scope of capabilities, including fab labs making bio labs, and an Open Metrology initiative that developed with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to expand access to advanced scientific measurements.
The biggest technological omission in the 2005 interview is what my lab (MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, or CBA) has spent the most time on since — the distinction between analog additive and subtractive processes and what I’ve called the fab 3.0 stage of discrete digital assemblers, and the fab 4.0 stage of machines and materials merging in self-assembly. CBA has since shown how the robotic assembly of functional building blocks can lead to record-setting material properties, and be used for making everything from cars to boats to planes to space structures. We’re studying the nanoscale boundary where bricks effectively become quantum, and are developing assemblers that can assemble themselves from the parts that they’re assembling. This recursion is at the heart of my 50-year digital fabrication scaling roadmap, and is the experimental realization of John von Neumann and Alan Turing’s theoretical models of life.
People
I found the most prescient part of the interview to be what seemed almost incidental at the time — the people that appear in the article.
One of the TAs I mentioned for my course How to Make (Almost) Anything, Raffi Krikorian, went on to create the computing infrastructure at Twitter, then rebooted computing for the DNC, and is now the Emerson Collective’s chief technology officer. Another, Manu Prakash, has become a pioneer in frugal innovation, famous for (among many other things) his 50-cent microscope that’s been distributed in the millions. One of the students, Amon Millner, coinvented the Scratch programming language that’s been used by millions of kids; another, Ayah Bdeir, created the littleBits electronics building blocks that have had a transformative impact on STEAM education.
I appreciated all of these people at the time, but didn’t foresee what their impact would be. Something similar followed at scale in the fab lab network; through it, countless remarkable people have become change agents: Abu Adam, Adam Stone, Adrián Torres, Adriana Cabrera, Anastasia Pistofidou, Aristarco Cortes, Bas Withagen, Beno Juarez, Blair Evans, Cecilia Raspanti, Chirag Sharma, Daniele Ingrassia, Duaa AlAali, Enrico Bassi, Felicity Mecha, Fiore Basile, Frosti Gíslason, Haakon Karlsen, Henk Buursen, Jani Ylioja, Jean-michel Molenaar, Jens Dyvik, Jogin Francis, Krisjanis Rijnieks, Srinath Kalbag, Kamau Gachigi, Katie Rast, Luciana Asinari, Luciano Betoldi, Mel King, Nadine Tuhaimer, Namgyal Gyaltshen, Nancy Wu, Norella Coronell, Nuria Robles, Pradnya Shindekar, Quentin Bolsée, Rahul Rajan, Rico Kanthatham, Santi Fuentemilla, Saverio Silli, Sibu Saman, Tomás Díez, Ujjwal Deep Dahal, Vaneza Caycho, and Youka Watanabe are just a sample. The social engineering that makes this possible for them has proved to be more significant than the technological engineering.
What began as an outreach project turned into inreach — more knowledge has come from the network than has gone out to it. The greatest opportunity I see at the intersection of digital communication, computation, and fabrication is tapping our greatest wasted natural resource: the underused brainpower of the planet. That’s why the newest projects I’m involved in are building on all of this fab lab infrastructure to create a distributed incubator and a platform to teach 21st-century vocational skills.
For Make:’s 40th anniversary it’s easy to predict that the “almost” will be dropped from How to Make (Almost) Anything, and that the metaphor of “bits to atoms” will become literal. What’s harder to predict, but even more exciting to shape, are the seeds being planted today for the future of how we’ll live, learn, work, and play.
Featured photo is Neil Gershenfeld addressing the audience at the FAB24 conference in Puebla, Mexico, in August 2024 by Grace Gershenfeld
Eric and Chung sent these videos to me. I had no idea that this was how masks and spray painting on toys were done. It's fascinating. It also provides a real world application of copper sheetmetal forms. Eric and I discussed the fact that these are most likely die formed copper sections made from the original design of the toy. It makes me want to explore more involving 3D printed (full infill) dies like we have been doing in my classes. I just want to create a more complex form than what we have doing. For the moment, we have just been doing shallow sinking forms that are similar to spoon or bowl shapes. I need to work on this during the summer.
I've been thinking about radiators lately. I'm not certain why but this is a good video to explain the process of making a radiator. I wonder if any of the knowledge or thoughts on construction of a radiator came from steam boilers? I'm just thinking through how we get from one place to another with technology and how we take something for granted once it works. I just hadn't given a lot of thought to what I would need to do to build a radiator from scratch.
The heat generated by the constant explosions in the engine would soon overheat and ruin the engine, were it not cooled by some artificial means. The Ford engine is cooled by the circulation of water in jackets around the cylinders. The heat is extracted from the water by its passing through the thin metal tubing of the radiator---to which are attached scientifically worked out fins, which assist in the rapid radiation of the heat. The fan, just back of the radiator, sucks the air around the tubing- around which the air is also driven by the forward movement of the car. The belt should be inspected frequently and tightened when necessary---not too tight, however---by means of the adjusting screw in the fan bracket. Take up the slack till the fan starts to bind when turned by hand.
How does the Water circulate?
Answer No. 36
The cooling apparatus of the Ford car is known as the Thermo-siphon system. It acts on the principle that hot water seeks a higher level than cold water---consequently when the water reaches a certain heat, approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit, circulation commences and the water flows from the lower radiator outlet pipe up through the water jackets, into the upper radiator water tank, and down through the tubes to the lower tank, to repeat the process.
What are the causes of Overheating?
Answer No. 37
(1) Carbonized cylinders;
(2) too much driving on low speed;
(3) spark retarded too far;
(4) poor ignition;
(5) not enough or poor grade oil;
(6) racing motor;
(7) clogged muffler;
(8) improper carburetor adjustment;
(9) fan not working properly on account of broken or slipping belt;
(10) improper circulation of water due to clogged or jammed radiator tubes, leaky connections or low water.
What should be done when the Radiator overheats?
Answer No. 38
Keep the radiator full. Don't get alarmed if it boils occasionally---especially in driving through mud and deep sand or up long hills in extremely warm weather. Remember that the engine develops the greatest efficiency when the water is heated nearly to the boiling point. But if there is persistent overheating when the motor is working under ordinary conditions---find the cause of the trouble and remedy it. The chances are that the difficulty lies in improper driving or carbonized cylinders. Perhaps twisting the fan blades at a greater angle to produce more suction may bring desired results. By reference to the proper division of this book each of the causes which contribute to an overheated radiator is treated and remedies suggested. No trouble can result from the filling of a heated radiator with cold water---providing the water system is not entirely empty---in which case the motor should be allowed to cool before the cold water is introduced.
How about cleaning the Radiator?
>Answer No. 39
The entire circulating system should be thoroughly flushed out occasionally. To do this properly, the radiator inlet and outlet hose should be disconnected, and the radiator flushed out by allowing the water to enter the filler neck at ordinary pressure, from whence it will flow down through the tubes and out at the drain cock and hose. The water jackets can be flushed out in the same manner. Simply allow the water to enter into the cylinder head connection and to flow through the water jackets and out at the side inlet connection.
Will the Radiator freeze in winter?
Answer No. 40
Yes, unless an anti-freezing solution is used in the circulating system you are bound to experience trouble. As the circulation does not commence until the water becomes heated, it is apt to freeze at low temperatures before it commences to circulate. In case any of the radiator tubes happen to be plugged or jammed they are bound to freeze and burst open if the driver undertakes to get along without using a non-freezing solution. Wood or denatured alcohol can be used to good advantage. The following table gives the freezing points of solutions containing different percentages of alcohol:
20% solution freezes at 15 degrees above zero.
30% solution freezes at 8 degrees below zero.
50% solution freezes at 34 degrees below zero.
A solution composed of 60% water, 10% glycerin and 30% alcohol is commonly used, its freezing point being about 8 degrees below zero.
On account of evaporation fresh alcohol must be added frequently in order to maintain the proper solution.
How are leaks and jams in the Radiator repaired?
Answer No. 41
A small leak may be temporarily repaired by applying brown soap or white lead---but the repair should be made permanent with solder as soon as possible. A jammed radiator tube is a more serious affair. While the stopping of one tube does not seriously interfere with the circulation, it is bound to cause trouble sooner or later---and the tube will freeze in cold weather. Cut the tube an inch above and below the jam and insert a new piece, soldering the connections. If the entire radiator is badly jammed or broken it would probably be advisable to install a new one.
This 1926 Panhard Razor reproduction being built by Dan Web and Cory Taulbert is insane! I've always loved his golden sub reproduction. This one will be one to watch!
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
