Packable Cardboard Workshop Elements

During the last few months, I’ve been traveling around the world hosting events for “The Tinkering Workshop” book tour with hands-on activities taken from the pages of the book. This means filling a suitcase with a bunch of materials and schlepping it around on buses, trains and airplanes. As I’ve been preparing these workshops, I’ve also been iterating on some of the activity elements, making them lighter and more packable for traveling tinkering. I wanted to share a few of the ideas that I’ve been experimenting with to hopefully encourage everyone to experiment with material, size and scale as they remix the projects in the book.

First up I wanted to share a quick update for the weighted wobblers bases. The elements from the book used common kitchen materials like straight glass jars and grains for weight but that’s not the best idea for something to jam into a suitcase. For recent workshops in the UK I simply packed cardboard circle bases, sturdy paper tubes and pencils and then spent 10 minutes hot gluing them together before the workshop.

This hot glue technique of “just-in-time” assembly works really well for packing tinkering supplies because then you don’t have to worry about the parts getting broken or smashed in transit. The simple elements also mean that I can bring more than needed and recycle the unused parts. I tried these stands at two different workshops at ShiftED in London and the Cambridge Science Center, breaking them apart gently between the workshops.

Another experiment for workshop elements was using small USB powered fans for the inflatable friends project. These are not nearly as powerful as the hair dryers (on cool setting) that I recommend in the book, but make for a much more packable solution. The one little adjustment that I had to make was hot gluing four little cardboard squares as feet around the outside of the fan so that the air could flow.

These little fans added some constraints on the projects which actually made for more tinkering explorations as participants needed to closely pay attention to the thickness of the plastic bag and the weight of the decorative elements on the characters.

And one more prototype that I’ve been playing around with recently is a remix of VoltPaperScissors’ spin art robots that are featured in “The Tinkering Workshop” art machines section. I cut a bunch of cardboard squares and wired up a switch, 3AA battery pack and hobby gear motor with cardboard supports.

The trickiest part of these machines is making the connection point between the cardboard disc and the motor. A couple options are these 3D printed hubs (which unfortunately aren’t so easy to get in Germany) or gluing the cardboard piece directly onto these yellow wheels that sometimes come with the motors. I used little hub connectors and large servo motor arms (with a bit of hot glue) but they needed to be readjusted many times over the course of the workshops.

I made some rough hangers for the second motor platforms that also could be quickly glued together onsite at the workshop (a moment that was captured by the local newspaper at this saturday’s tuefteltour project). There are a lot of adjustments that I am thinking about for these art machines including adjustable speed with servo motors, a way to easily add pen-up and pen-down functionality as well as more flexible arrangement of the two spinning layers.

Each one of these project adaptations shows the wide walls of the projects featured in “The Tinkering Workshop” book. One of my goals for writing this guide was to give starting points that let people take the ideas and make them bigger or smaller, change out materials or (in my case) able to be more easily fit inside a suitcase. Let me know what adjustments and modifications you’ve tried for the tinkering prompts in the pages of the book.