DIY stands for Do It Yourself; anyone into it? There's loads of dedicated wikis and forums on the subject, so I want to relate it with TC. Being hikki, neet, unnormal, social outcast or what have you, may imply that money gets tight, but free time maybe not. Doing/making it yourself instead of buying it can help the shorts meet the ends. I'll use myself as an example: I don't work, and I don't intend to anytime soon either. I love music, and I want it to sound its best, so I look to hi-fi. Hifi is expensive, but it can be made by amateur hands if you know what you want. I could invest in a $2000 amp.. or I could make one myself for $200. The money you save by making what can be made by common folk yourself can be spent on what can't be made by common folk - like computers or figurines. Hell, computers can be assembled by anyone, servers can be old, repurposed hardware, and a chassis can be whatever you want. If you're modest about your needs, even figurines can be made by hand - through clay, paper, wool, repurposed dolls and maybe open source 3D printers in the near future. Imagination is the limit, and all you need is the right material, time and a will to make it happen. The down-side is that material can be hard to find, good end-result is not guaranteed, skill can be limiting, learning process can be exhausting and there are hazards if you're not careful. I hope we can get a nice thread going if there's interest, and my hope is that we can help, motivate, share and lift up eachother and make some great stuff. I'll be sharing ideas, projects and works in due time.
Not much new here. Found a tiny delorian that works well as a stand in for the 1/15 scale one I keep in the same spot.
The details are really incredible! But for a room with so much stuff in it, I wonder how big of a project you're undertaking, even if you're only going to recreate a representative sample of the figures and such.
>>2384 In some ways I view it as a never ending project. There's always gonna be something to do. At least I have the majority of the furniture finished. Can't much say I'm looking forward to doing my computer area though. The smaller stuff would be easy with a 3dprinter I think, but since I'll probably never afford one I dunno. just gotta do what I can.
>>2386 Are you gonna include a mini-you someday?
>>2387 I would if I could make custom figs, but that's a little out of my league.
>>2388 Your avatar? it can't be so hard to work from some figma. Give it a shot someday, if you want to. After seeing your models I have faith in you.
I was planing on starting on the lights, but when testing them out I found that they don't look very good at all. I can trim off the parts blow and above the leds, but even so they seem like they'd be too big and spaced out. these are actually the same led strips used in the full sized room that I had spares of. I've looked around online but couldn't find any lights that would work better. I think I've seen small light strings in the past but can't remember the proper term for them. edit: just found out about something called "el wire" might give that a try. I'd love to get your thoughts and opinions on this here. >>2389 I gave it some thought and think I might be able to pull it off by combining parts from the ritsu, f/sn rin, and maybe Ryomou Shimei figmas.Post edited on 5th Aug 2014, 11:26pm
>>2393 EL wire would probably work. You could also try placing a frosted strip of acrylic in front of the LEDs to diffuse the light, maybe recessed in the wall to simulate the look of your real room.
>>2394 >You could also try placing a frosted strip of acrylic in front of the LEDs to diffuse the light, maybe recessed in the wall lol, that same exact thought crossed my mind too.
Okay so the el-wire I ordered finally showed up today. To my dismay, it was a lot more dim than expected. It barely lights up my mini room at all. Does anyone with any knowledge of el wire know if it's possible to increase the brightness? say add some more batteries or run it off a 9v maybe? or would that burn out the light?
>>2400 https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/LED/Technical%20Information%20of%20Flexible%20Neon%20wire.pdf I found this spec sheet which states it's good from 20-220v. I don't know if your specific model is the same but you will probably be fine with higher voltages.
>>2401 >20-220v. that's strange becuase they almost all seem to be sold with power packs meant for two AA batteries, which is about 3v I believe?
>>2401 >>2402 whelp I tried cutting a piece off and connecting it to a 9volt battery. it wouldn't turn on. It didn't burn out though, becuase I connected it to the 2AA pack and it lit up okay. I think the pack might be converting the power from ac to dc or something like that.
>>2403 All batteries are DC, so it probably isn't that. I don't really know what to say if it doesn't work from a 9v battery, maybe try hooking it up to the 5v or 12v rails of your computer power supply?
>>2404 Or from dc to ac rather. The battery container seems to also be an inverter. I checked with my voltage meeter and apparently the device is essentially always on. Seems the on/off button only turns on the inverter. Guess I get to get an inverter that can handle more than 3v
I modified my yoyo. I removed the original pictures on the sides and put my own inside. The images are from the anime 'Fantasista Doll', I just used them because I saw an ad in a magazine I had laying around and I was willing to cut it up. Later I'm planning on putting images of Yuno in there instead, but I don't have a color picture of her here I'm willing to cut out. I also made the string by myself using yarn.
>>2406 Not bad
Finished my arcade machine. I made the screen in two layers so I could insert videogame screencaps behind the plastic, but haven't printed any out yet. Frecking Yui here fell over and busted my table.
>>2410 You can see the real one in the background here for a bit of comparison.
>>2411 That looks fantastic. It took me a few moments to realize which photo is the miniature one, you've done a great job with the details.
>>2412 Thanks, and it's one photo by the way. Taken from inside of the model with it lined up to match the real one.
>>2410 With one of the screencap inserts.
>>2415 and here with a cap from the game I probably played the most on this thing.
>>1271 Compared to a lot of other complex DIY mechanisms, guns are pretty easy to make.
>>2130 So I finally got around to tearing up this display case and working on rebuilding it. It just took me a while to work up the motivation... Used a shitty as fuck rusted up table saw my dad gave me (I think he just wanted to get rid of it) thing sucked ass and left me with screwed up cuts, but the wood I had on hand was practically like cardboard so I was able to cut it properly using a box cutter (but it took forever) sure would be nice to have some proper tools...
Finally got some motivation to start working on this room some more. Figured I'd finish the detailing of the dvd rack since I already had the print outs made for some time now.
Table guy here. Hey, why not do an update? Wow, turned out this DIY thing was only a fleeting interest. I've since moved house and donated the unfinished table to a family member as a workbench. Ugly but sturdy! I pretty much only have Ikea furniture now. It's funny how things change and you suddenly don't give a shit about certain things anymore. Okay, I guess that's it!
>>2468 Mini-you when?
Currently working on my bunk bed/computer desk. This is the largest piece of furniture in the room which is why I put it off till now. hopefully it wont come out like ass. >>2473 Well there's a few figma parts out there I've thought of combining and working with, just not sure about the head...
I've been dreaming of an "auto-onahole" for a while now. But I have no idea what kind of mechanism would work for it. I was thinking of essentially making a drill and having the onahole spin around, but I don't know what kind of motor I could use, which would be both strong and gentle. Anyone got any ideas? I'm not going for an autosuck, I want the motion. I'd like an up-and-down motion too, but I'm even more clueless about what would work there.
>>2478 Slow goings here. I really need to tare myself away from my pc more...
>>2480 For a strong but slow motion you can probably get a small hobby motor and arrange a set of gears to convert the high speed of the motor to a slow speed but high torque thing. I'm not sure a 'twisting' motion would be very pleasurable, and if it only twisted in one direction without alternating direction it would do nothing except chafe your dick, but for the up down you can use a piston-like mechanism like in my picture.Post edited on 28th Mar 2015, 4:40am
>>2461 Been on the backburner for a while but finally got some work done on this thing. Been running out of space for figs so that's kinda been acting as some real motivation to get this done.
>>2563 Design probably could have been better. Had a little trouble keeping the plexiglass in place at first, but glued in a few little tab things I made quick and they worked okay. In retrospect it might have been better to build the case and paint it before inserting the plexiglass but whatever.
>>2566 I was a fair way into the painting process before remembering the LEDs. At first I was gonna leave them unpainted but thought that wouldn't look too good so what I did was dropped little dabs of elmer's glue over each LED so I could paint over the whole thing and pull the paint off latter easily. After all elmer's glue doesn't really stick that well to.. anything really lol. Unfortunately I didn't block off the back well enough and that kinda screwed up the finish. Already applied like five coats of paint on the thing, removed all the tape/paper, and really just wanted to get it over with so I just rolled with it.
>>2567 and here's the final product. It's not great but I'd like to think it looks a lot better than >>2060 did.
>>2468 you are amazing
>>2568 I think it looks darn nice.
So I've been using a modified dvd rack to store a fair amount of my figs, but I wanted something that could house my entire figma collection or close to it. I couldn't find anything on the market that suited my needs, so I drew up some plans and... after putting this on holds for more than a year I've finally gotten around to working on it. Didn't exactly help that the plans kept going missing.
>>3022 Transporting materials for something like this can be a pain in the ass, since most stuff doesn't fit in my car. I also don't really trust places like lowes/homedepot with cutting stuff for me. I had them do some 2x4s for a fishtank stand I'm building and some of those cuts were really off. They're pretty 'whatever' about it.
>>3023 The boards sat in my garage for weeks. A handyman who's been helping us remodel our garage said he works at a factory with precision equipment and could cut me out all the pieces I need. He took two of the plan sheets I made, never picked up the boards then a couple weeks latter showed up with a stack of six foot boards he cut from material even though nothing in the project is 6foot. So the guy we rent a room to offered to lend me his miter saw. With that I was able to quickly knock out most of the parts.
>>3024 The plan calls for the equivalent of 50 cubes across two units. I estimate I can fit 2-3 figs per cube. Only some of the dividers would be fixed in place though, so if I had a larger collection of say 6 figma based on some game/anime, then I could take a devider out and give them two cubes worth of space. There's only going to be 4 that are 3 cubes wide, but that should be good.
>>3025 Wish I had more time to work on this. I've been really taking my time and going slowly at this. Tools keep going missing too since the garage is being worked on, and materials might get tossed around, so I have to keep a lot of stuff in my room. Like everything else I'll be painting it black. Still not sure about how LED would work but I'm thinking maybe mounting a wood strip above each row to put the lights on. Also considering glass/plexiglass doors but that'd probably be pricy for something this big.
>>3026 Forgot to update things here. After putting together one of the units I decided to carve a channel into the top front lip of each board to install the lights. This meant having to take the one unit apart. I tested a couple methods of carving the channel into some scrap wood, but in the end decided to get a router table. This produced much better results than I could have gotten cutting the channels by hand.
>>3056 I used the same router to cut channels into the sides of each unit to hide the electrical components. Once I assembled the units I ran the LED strips along each board leading to a plug hole that would be in the back.
>>3057 Once that was done I taped up the LED, put strips of wood in the side channel, filled all the screw holes and what not with wood filler and smoothed it all out. Then it was onto painting, noticing mistakes, sanding, and painting again a few times.. I was going to paint it black but after talking it over with people on irc decided to just go with white to better show the LED colors.
>>3058 I wanted to put some acrilix in front of the cases but it seems every business in the area has been building forts out of the stuff to cover their check out lines/registers, so I decided to call it with this. Getting the two cases to plug in together was a pain in the butt. I ended up having to take these rather heavy things down to rethink the method and try again. But even after getting them to sort of work, I think I screwed something up because they wont stay on for long before the adapter gets stupidly hot and shuts them down. Gonna have to keep them powered off until I can get around to figuring out what the problem is. I can only assume they cases didn't plug in properly, as I was kinda doing that blind.
>>3059 I love those diorama-like scenes, can you post some closer pics? How you made them? Plan to do more? I can't imagine a coolest way to expose figma.
>>3060 The plan was to make backgrounds and dioramas for each space in the units. They're basically just BG I screen capped or found online and printed out. I'll eventually have to redo the backgrounds that are in place now because I made them with another display case in mind which I was using before this. And sorry for the shit quality cam. It needs good lighting but I'm planing on leaving the case off for now because I think there's a fault in the wiring causing a short. The power adapters I connect to this thing get stupidly hot and turn off, which could possibly start a fire. It sucks but I think I'm gonna have to take these cases back down, open them up, and fix the wiring.
>>3063 Keep postings pics if you feel like, quality is fine, the whole idea seems quite amazing to me. I love to see those huge projects to make a room to look like a museum.
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