Tag Archives: steel

Inflated Mylar Balloon Stools Won’t Pop When You Sit on Them

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Designed by Oskar Zieta and available from the Gessato design store, the Plopp metal stool has the appearance of an inflated mylar balloon. It’s nobody’s birthday though, the stools are actually constructed of welded steel sheets that have been industrially inflated using a process developed by Zieta known as “free inner pressure deformation”. The Big Bad Wolf is impressed!

The 19.5″ stools are available in a variety of colors (red, green, yellow, black, white, grey, and raw steel) for $525 – or polished steel for $725. So while they’re certainly not the least expensive stool option, they do look the most like inflated balloons. Is that worth over $500? My wife is shaking her head no, but she’s also a notorious Jeff Koons critic.

What a surprise it’s going to be when we have guests over to the house and I pretend to inflate stools for everyone! Maybe not as surprised as my wife is going to be when she realizes I spent $2,100 on novelty stools, but the garage isn’t going to sleep in itself, you know.

This Millennium Falcon Fire Pit Has Got Fire in Her Belly

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She may not look like much, but this fire pit has got it where it counts, kid. Normally, if you saw giant flames shooting out of the Millennium Falcon, you’d think it was curtains for Han and Chewie. But this version of their ship is designed to take plenty of heat as it emerges from hyperspace with the Empire on its tail.

This awesome Millennium Falcon fire pit was built by artist Alex Dodson of Burned by Design, and definitely looks like it could outrun one of their TIE Fighter candlesticks. Want to know how it did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs? Fire is always a good source of motivation.

The fire pit measures 74 x 38 x 40cm (appx. 29.1″ x 15″ x 15.7″), and is welded together from durable 3mm mild steel. The design incorporates laser cut parts to give the ship lots of cool details, and its back section flips up to provide easy access to add and remove logs. I wonder if this how they work on the engines of the actual Millennium Falcon when they bring it in for service.

All this Star Wars craftsmanship doesn’t come cheap though. This unique fire pit is listed at over $1100 over on Burned by Design’s Etsy shop, and that doesn’t include the $200 or so it’ll cost to ship this thing over from the UK. If only they could ship it via hyperspace.

This TIE Fighter Fire Pit Has an Imperial Flame Job

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When you see a TIE fighter on fire, it usually means it’s been hit by a Rebel ship and it’s about to explode into a massive fireball. But here’s one case where a flaming TIE fighter will last for a good long time. In fact, I’d love to have one of these TIE fighter fire pits to keep me warm on chilly nights.

The flaming TIE fighter was built by artist and tinkerer Simon Gould, who creates all kinds of unusual things in his UK workshop. Among them is a table made from the engine block from a Land Rover. While I think that’s swell, the TIE fighter with flames shooting out of its top is more my cup of tea. I like to picture this thing spiraling through a trench on the Death Star before coming in for a landing in my backyard.

If you’d like Simon to build you a flaming TIE fighter, or perhaps a flaming Land Rover engine block, you can hit him up with a private message on Facebook or Instagram.

(Thanks for the tip, Christian!)

Twisting Steel with LEGO Motors

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LEGO bricks are some of the most awesome things on earth. They’re incredibly versatile for building all kinds of structures, and you can make some pretty impressive machines with them when you combine them with Technic and Mindstorms parts. I’ve always assumed that LEGO motors and gears aren’t particularly strong, but it turns out with the proper engineering, you can use them to bend and twist steel.

Brick Experiment Channel loves to create LEGO machines that show off their strength. He recently built a rig that uses a pair of LEGO Power Functions XL motors along with a number of gears to reduce their speed and increase their torque output. The result is a machine that that outputs 15 Newton meters (~11 lb-ft.) of torque, and is capable of taking a stainless steel axle and twisting it like a drill bit (or a Twizzler).

The builder’s ultimate goal was to see if he could actually break the steel rod before the LEGO parts would fail. By twisting the metal back and forth numerous times, he was ultimately able to introduce enough metal fatigue to to make the axle crack. It’s pretty amazing that this is possible, and looks like a fun science experiment for LEGO fans to try and replicate at home.

Here are 10 products Tesla should make with its Cybertruck’s ‘bulletproof’ steel

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Perhaps one of the most impressive things to come out of the Cybertruck launch was the steel that Musk decided to use in his pickup truck. The steel formed what was called the truck’s exoskeleton and didn’t rely on an internal chassis for strength. Basically, the steel body was literally the thing holding the truck together. Developed to be used on SpaceX’s rockets, this specially formulated alloy of steel boasts of such high strength, it’s physically impossible to mold/cast/stamp it into the shape of your choice (and it stops 9mm bullets too). Imagine your design process being completely dominated by your choice of material. We’ve sort of come a full circle in automotive design, haven’t we?!

Anyway, it got me thinking. What if Tesla, in its signature ‘coolbro’ fashion decided to launch its own series of products using this particular strain of steel? It wouldn’t be a newfangled idea, considering the company sold 200 limited edition Tesla-branded carbon-fiber surfboards at $1,500 a pop just last year. So just in case someone from Tesla’s marketing and product development team is reading this, here are 10 ideas for products Tesla could make using their invincible bulletproof steel.

01. CyberSteel Padlock


That level of impenetrable, bulletproof, sledgehammer resistant security should extend to other stuff too, right? Locker, garage, home, bunker, bicycle, the Tesla Steel Padlock can safeguard them all. With an entirely steel-made construction, it’s impossible to break or saw apart, and the presence of a biometric scanner means nobody can pick it either. What happens if the fingerprint reader breaks? Unlock it with your Tesla keyfob, I suppose.

02. CyberSteel Vault


Oceans Eleven would be an incredibly long movie if something like the Tesla Vault existed as a standalone product. Hammers, drills, dynamite, nothing gets you past the impenetrable vault. The space-grade steel is strong enough to withstand high temperatures that spacecrafts experience as they re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, so this vault may even put up a pretty good fight against thermite.

03. CyberSteel Smartphone Cases


Gone are the days of weak, fragile, bendy aluminum phones. While this rather wonderful concept by Jonas Dahnert only displays what a Cyberphone would look like, imagine if your iPhone or Google Pixel had a Tesla Cybersteel-reinforced (is that what they call it?) smartphone case. The Nokia 3310 finally has some competition.

04. CyberSteel Laptop Bodies


An idea sparked by Min-Liang Tan and the guys at Razer, I’d really love to see a laptop with a steel chassis. A nice, robust, shatterproof gaming laptop that you literally couldn’t break even if you went into a fit of uncontrollable rage after losing a game. Heck, with its bulletproof construction, you could literally defend your life against muggers with it.

05. CyberSteel Protective Gear


Speaking of defending oneself, the bulletproof, sledgehammer-proof steel could just as easily see applications in protective equipment. From construction gear to police and military gear, the applications are endless. Why else would the Dubai Police put in a bulk order for an entire Cybertruck fleet?

06. CyberSteel Spectacle Frames


I’ll admit I’m personally invested in this one, being a spectacle wearer myself. Given how thin and fragile spectacles can be, it would be nice to have a pair that are reinforced with this steel. What about the lenses? I have my doubts about that Cybertruck glass.

07. CyberSteel Umbrella Frames


Just as fragile as spectacles are those umbrella frames. It’s estimated that as many as 1.1 billion umbrellas are thrown away each year after being rendered useless. Now I know the logistics of manufacturing an umbrella frame that’s usually stamped out of sheet-metal that’s less than a millimeter thick doesn’t apply to the 3mm thick steel used in the Cybertruck, but hey, Musk isn’t known to back away from a challenge, is he?

08. CyberSteel Voyager Record


Now I originally thought of a steel Tesla Surfboard (to follow its previous Carbon-Fiber Surfboard series), but a surfboard with steel that strong could literally guillotine your limb right off your body if you lost your balance, so here’s something more sensible.
When NASA launched the Voyager 1 in 1977, they included with it two vinyl records crafted in gold, containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any extraterrestrial species. I say hey, instead of launching a Tesla Roadster into space, how about we drop Volume II of that Voyager Record imprinted in steel, complete with updated contemporary references from over 40 years later.

09. CyberSteel Construction Material


If SpaceX could use that steel to build spacecrafts, Tesla could probably make and sell a few Cyber-bunkers too. Made from perhaps one of the strongest alloys known to us, imagine a bunker that’s hurricane-proof, quake-proof, and even nuclear-bomb proof. I mean you could throw in one of Tesla’s Biohazard-mode air-filters inside and you’ve got yourself a quaint doomsday shelter.

10. CyberSteel Sledgehammer


In signature ‘fire-fights-fire’ spirit, behold the Tesla Cyber-hammer, the only sledgehammer that can dent the Cybertruck! I imagine there’s an entire army of YouTubers who would buy this just so they could try it out on their Cybertrucks for some ‘views’. A good idea? Probably not. A good marketing strategy? I mean Elon’s sold thousands of flamethrowers already… What’s a couple of sledgehammers?

This 3D-Printed Metal Guitar is Absolutely Indestructible.

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A lot of moments in rock history are defined by the iconic guitar-smash… and while I personally don’t think it’s particularly nice to smash musical equipment, what if you designed a guitar that, if you look at the image immediately below, couldn’t be smashed?

That’s what Sandvik decided to do. Designed to show off their advanced titanium additive printing techniques (and also their engineering prowess), they designed the world’s first guitar that can’t be smashed. Literally. Many have even tried, including rockstar Yngwie Malmsteen, who managed to wreck his stage amps and monitors, but couldn’t get the guitar to even as much as deform.

Sandvik partnered with guitar-designer Andy Holt over what sounds like a pretty unusual design brief… Designing an electric guitar that was virtually indestructible, but also sounded incredibly good. The design process included hours of analyzing footage of guitars being smashed (many by Malmsteen himself) to analyze the biggest points of weaknesses. After creating a design that they deemed was the strongest guitar ever made (they ran their own crash-test simulations too), Sandvik built the guitar out of titanium dust using an additive manufacturing process called Direct Metal Laser Sintering. The neck and the body of the guitar were milled together from a single piece of Sandvik’s ‘hyper-duplex’ steel to ensure absolute strength at what is considered the guitar’s weakest point. The result? A guitar that looks fabulous, with its virtually hollow design, sounds great, thanks to Andy Holt’s expertise, and is potentially as unbreakable as the hammer of Thor. Maybe not the strings, though…

Designers: Andy Holt & Sandvik.

Behold the knife that comes with a stone-coated blade!

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Designed with looks and a performance that quite literally set it a class apart from other knives, the Kyowa Super Stone Barrier Knife comes with a blade that’s hand-finished to perfection by craftsmen who have preserved the traditional techniques of Japanese sword-making, which have existed since the 13th century… and oh, the unusually un-metallic texture around the knife’s blade stems from the fact that the Super Stone Barrier Knife comes with a stone coating around the metal blade.

Coated meticulously with 6 different layers of stone, the Super Stone Barrier Knife’s blade is just literally a 0.01mm sheet of metal in a stone armor. The metal is exposed just at the edge of the blade, giving it substantial sharpness that allows the knife to slice cleanly through food with little to no resistance or friction. The stone coating adds precision and durability, but also offers a strikingly unique look, and a textured surface that acts as a natural non-stick. It also makes sure the blade will never rust, tarnish, warp, or dent, allowing the unique-looking and uniquely built Super Stone Barrier Knife to last MUCH longer than traditional steel blades.

Designer: Kyowa

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Whisky Bullets Will Cool Your Shots

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I’m not much for drinking hard alcohol, but one of my biggest pet peeves is a watered down Dr. Pepper, so I can still get behind these Whisky Bullets. These are stainless steel slugs that keep your drink nice and cool.

Simply put them in the freezer for at least four hours, then drop them in your whisky or Dr. Pepper and they will chill the drink without melting and watering it down.

You can get a set of six Whisky Bullets each measuring 2.5″ tall and 0.5″ in diameter for $44.99(USD) at ThinkGeek. If you want that awesome black cylinder to store the bullets in, you will need to cough up another $24.99. Not cheap, but they are very cool.

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