Check out more Oshkosh photos in the gallery.

EAA Video: Airventure 2010

Time to get psyched for Oshkosh, “The World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration.” Be there or be square!

EAA Video: Blast From The Past, Part 1

Check out this great EAA archival footage of fly-ins from ’50s and ’60s. Campy, but cool!

EAA Video: Remember the Foxjet?

I ran across this cool promo video for the Foxjet ST600 while checking out my EAA feeds. Designed in the late ’70s, the Foxjet was the predecessor to the modern VLJs (very light jets), and had some of the same shortcomings. But this video is worth a watch just for the cool retro music and cheesy special effects. Learn more about the Foxjet here.

Watch and enjoy this 60-minute interview with Burt Rutan on the future of transportation — in both air and space (via Big Think).

For the past few days, I’ve been jumping-out-of-my-shoes excited from reading the cover story of the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine entitled “The New Industrial Revolution,” by long-tail theorist Chris Anderson, and the related issue of Make magazine, the theme of which is “Desktop Manufacturing.”

The Wired article is simply a must-read for anyone interested in making things — in turning ideas into physical reality.

The basic premise is this: The tools of digital design and fabrication — which traditionally were high-priced, closed-source, corporate-entity terrain — are now becoming cheap enough to find their way into the hands of small startups, hackerspaces, and even individuals.

Digital Fabrication and the MakerBot

What is digital fabrication? 100kGarages says it best:

Digital fabrication allows a precise design to be created using computer software and then passed to another computer attached to a fabrication or CNC tool, which are capable of producing the 3D design with high precision and detail. This fidelity to the design means that the parts or components are cut, drilled, or machined exactly as expected and exactly the same each time.

Both Make and Wired profile MakerBot Industries, and their associated physical and virtual communities, NYC Resistor and Thingiverse. MakerBot is a three-person startup in NYC which sells kits for their “Cupcake CNC” 3D printers — computer-controlled devices that can take a digital file of a 3D object and “print” the real thing right on your desktop — all for under $1000.

NYC Resistor is a Brooklyn hackerspace where the MakerBot founders met and tested ideas for their prototype device, and Thingiverse is their online repository of downloadable and printable objects — all created and uploaded by their community of MakerBot users.

You can learn more about MakerBot and Thingiverse from the video below:

Open-Source Hardware and the Long Tail

What this means is that more and more garage and basement hackers are going to be able to bring their ideas to marketplace. They’ll be able to create the “long tail” of products that the big corporations can’t, while retaining the flexibility to change direction swiftly and iterate more often.

What’s more, the shared nature of what Tom Igoe calls “open fabrication” will allow makers from all over the world to collaborate on open-source hardware projects, just like they do with software today.

Big changes are coming.

Cool Links

Some popular 3D CAD software:

• SolidWorks The (pricey) real deal.
• Rhino 3D Free trial.
• Alibre Design Free (Xpress version).
• Google SketchUp Free.

Some Personal CNC tools:

• Lumenlab “micRo” universal fabricator.
• ShopBot Shop-sized mill/router.
• Tormach Bench-top CNC mills.

Via the VAF forums: Check out Steve Schulte’s awesome full-screen photo gallery featuring some outstanding air-to-air shots of an RV-4 and a Lancair in close formation.

EAA Video: Around the World on 100 hp

This is one of the most inspirational videos I’ve seen in a while. Mike Blyth and James Pitman, a pair of South Africans — along with their team at The Airplane Factory — have designed, built, and flown a developmental prototype Experimental Light-Sport Aircraft (E-LSA) called the “D6 Sling” across the Atlantic to Oshkosh, and are continuing around the world. See more photos and video at Around the World Expedition 2009.

Airventure 2009

My humble photos just don’t do it justice compared to this gorgeous video by Slick Hutto from YouTube. Watch it in HD and full screen if you can.

EAA: Rick Gray's F-1 Rocket

Rick Gray (EAA 620798) describes the building and flying of his immaculate F-1 Rocket. The F-1 is a derivative of Van’s RV-4 and the Harmon Rocket II hotrod. Learn more at the Team Rocket Aircraft website.