Some of you may already know about this trick, but for those who don’t (like me), it will blow your mind.
I made a short video showing how to attach a screw hook using a drill. This came in handy recently when I needed to add dozens of cup hooks to my tea cup storage area.
Follow along with the story of Twan Baker, the prop baby who has been in two Broadway shows and over half a dozen regional theatre productions. He is kept and cared for by a growing family tree of actors and writers and has his own adventures.
Steve Hoefer has been writing a series of beginner’s guides to various tools, and his latest is on drills and bits. If you’ve ever grabbed a spade bit to drill through metal, please stop and read this guide first.
I’ve been watching some videos of the Creature Technology Company lately, which makes massive animatronic creatures for giant arena shows. This behind the scenes look at the How to Train Your Dragon Arena Spectacular shows just what I’m talking about.
Finally, are you a fan of the Fake and Bake blog (a blog all about making fake food)? Anna Warren, the writer and a good friend, has branched out and started a company called Tactile Craftworks making handmade and hand-bound leather journals with etched details (among other things). They have just started a Kickstarter to produce an Atlas Series of journals, with covers of maps of either Milwaukee or Chicago. Head on over and check it out, and maybe pick up a journal or two!
Make Magazine has a great slideshow on “Ten Tips for Drilling Better Holes“. It is a good reminder that even seemingly simple tasks can have a lot of considerations in achieving a good result. While I would not take anything off the list they present, I would add one: be sure the drill bit will not hit your hand as it exits the other side of the material (or if it slips off).
I saw this over at La Bricoleuse and had to share: it’s a Rit Dye color chart. Choose the color you want, and it will tell you which Rit dye or combination of dyes will give you that color. Now, a lot of other factors go into achieving certain colors on particular fabrics, and Rit is not the best dye for all types of fabrics, but it is readily available at most local stores and easy to work with in a pinch, and this chart is a good starting point for many colors.
I just stumbled on a cool blog called the “Creaturiste’s Labatory”. He has a post on oil clay vs water clay in terms of sculpting, though many of the other posts are useful and interesting as well.
This is pretty cool: The official licensed replicas of props from Doctor Who are being manufactured by the same prop maker who builds them for the show.
Finally, here is a very cool video of Tony Swatton forging one of the swords from the series Game of Thrones. He has a number of videos showing the making of other weapons as well. It’s amazing to see the mix of tools and techniques he uses for hand-forging custom weapons at the pace which the entertainment industry requires. Though he mainly does film, TV and theme parks, I’ve heard his name mentioned in theatrical circles as well.
Here’s a story about a prop master who has found a new career killing zombies. I think most props people imagine they would be pretty well equipped to fight zombies.
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) has quite an intense and detailed tutorial on making a silicone rubber mold with a plaster mother mold (or as he calls it, a “hard shell mold”). It is perhaps a bit more involved than most theatrical prop shops would ever need, but a lot of the extra steps he does are to keep the mold from collapsing on itself and to ensure the two halves are lined up perfectly.
What do you want to know about drill bits? How about everything! Ok, so this free PDF guide to drill bits deals only with woodworking (no metal or plastics), but it is still a useful amount of information available at a glance.
This is kind of cool. A classmate of mine from undergrad wrote a play a few years ago called The Love of Three Oranges. One of the productions of this play is documenting the construction of their set and props on a blog.
So, I’ve talked about the invention of the jig saw before; its history is at least somewhat intertwined with the history of fret and scroll saws. Well, Chris Schwartz has a piece on the history of the coping saw, another tool sharing this history. I personally love my coping saw, and consider it one of the indispensable tools in my prop-making bag.
