Here's a nice collection of CPU throughout the ages.

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Frank Westfall's 1930 Art Deco Henderson motorcycle via Twitter. Knucklebuster writes -

I took these photos at the Rhinebeck Grand National Meet where the newly restored bike was unveiled. The bike belongs to Frank Westfall from Syracuse, NY. According to some info I found online, the bike was originally built by O. Ray Courtney in 1936 and is based on a 1930 K.J Henderson. The bike is powered by inline four cylinder (not a scooter as some have said, check the shot of the motor below) and as I’m sure you can gather by now, is a one-off custom. What I can confirm is it does run and while it looked a bit unwieldy, Frank could be seen riding the bike around the Fairgrounds all weekend. But let’s be honest here (and maybe I’m wrong) - you don’t have this bike in your stable to go out for a long Sunday afternoon ride to get some ice cream. That said, it was pretty awesome to see the bike being ridden (even when rain started to come down) instead of being sheltered behind a velvet rope, never to see the rubber touch asphalt again. The bike is a fantastic piece of history, the craftsmanship is absolutely stunning and it’s surely more of a museum piece than a daily rider. Frank has obviously spent an incredible amount of time meticulously restoring and rebuilding the bike to its current gorgeous state. Hats off to Frank for the amazing work he did and for sharing it with all us gawkers.

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My buddy Mike Cook of Portland, Michican, has been knapping for 30 years. It shows. And while I'd probably never dare to use such a knife for fear of damaging it, I'm still amazed at how inexpensive fine hand-knapped points and blades are compared to handmade steel knives. A traditional custom knifemaker with Mike's experience would charge several times as much for his skill. I first ran across Mike's work on FlintKnappers.com, which is a great all-around resource for those interested in the hobby.

More:How-To: Knap an arrowhead from a beer bottleBook Review: Caveman Chemistry by Kevin Dunn

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Restored Edison Electric car from 1889. Charles writes...

Hello again! I looked up from my computer today to take a look at the history of one of the major projects we are working on at Global Research– electrification of the world.   Here is what I found.  What is really interesting is that I believe this video was filmed when the car was being driven to our Global Research campus for the 2008 Battery Symposium that we hosted. It is a video of a restored Edison Electric car, located in our hometown of Schenectady, NY at the Edison Exploratorium. It had a 26 volt GE Automobile Motor Patent 1889.

It's 121 years later.

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Patrick Parrish was vacationing in North Carolina when he spotted this long-abandoned yet fully stocked machine shop:

It looked like one day possibly in the 1960s or 70s that they just up and closed without even clearing off their desks. The window were so filty, but it looked AMAZING inside. I would kill to get in there to see the machines and tools that were all just sitting there in a state of suspended animation....

Wouldn't that be weird if someone shut down your neighborhood hackerspace one day but never cleared the equipment out? [Via Dinosaurs and Robots]

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When I first saw Chris's gorgeous brass-and-wood irising door peephole mechanism in the ShopBot booth at Maker Faire, I knew it was something special: A beautiful piece of machinery, designed and built solely for the pleasure of operating and observing its operation. When Chris contacted us wanting to sell them in Makers Market, naturally I was excited, but I was also a bit skeptical. I couldn't imagine that such a large, relatively complex machine of solid brass and wood could be manufactured and sold at anything like a reasonable price point. But the $285 Chris is now asking, while certainly not cheap, is about 35% of what I was expecting to see when I clicked on his listing. I will be surprised if he can afford to continue selling them at that price. Which is why I already bought mine.

More:Cardboard irising peephole modelAn iris by any other name?

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The Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). We look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE Volume 17

I can't think of a more romantic makery job than running an antique automata fix-it shop. You get to be part Geppetto, part horologist, and part Dr. Tyrell from Bladerunner. Such is the life of "automatist" Michael Start and his partner, sculptor and artist, Maria Start. From their shop, in Findhorn, Scotland, which looks like something straight from a fantasy movie set, they repair antique automata and singing birds. It's a union made in a clockwork heaven. Michael, a trained horologist, does the mechanical repairs, and Maria sculpts the missing body parts and expertly color-matches the time-worn paint jobs. Here's a brief video tour of their shop:

On their website, House of Automata (formerly Autonomania), they can claim (and who would challenge them?) to be "the UK's only specialist automata restoration company." Wonder how many self-described "automatists" there are in the world? And automata repairmen? Now there's a party in a teacup.

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Finally a use for plastic blister pack packaging - pinball machine repair!

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Retro Thing has a great article on recreating an archaic recording device to recover some old recordings. A while back Schenectady Museum curator Chris Hunter came across some old pallophotophone recordings from radio station WGY. "What's a pallophotophone?", you might ask. Also known as the RCA Photophone, it's an early recording device developed by GE researcher Charles Hoxie.

Eventually Hunter meets GE Engineer Russ DeMuth, who recreates a pallophotophone from Hoxie's original design and manages to extract some rather interesting recordings from the old media. Recovered are long-lost recordings of GE founder Thomas Edison, Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, a recording thought to be the second oldest known sports broadcast, and the earliest known recording of the NBC chimes.

Recreating the RCA Photophone

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In Wired's "Raw File," they have a charming piece about typewriter repair shops and repairmen, profiling three shops in the Bay Area:

Despite these inefficiencies, there are a few places where typewriters still clack away. New York City police stations, the desks of a few stubborn hangers-on, and, increasingly, the apartments of hip young people who have a fetish for the retro. Mechanical devices with a lot of moving parts, typewriters require maintenance by technicians with specialized knowledge and years of experience. A surprising number of people still make their living meeting that demand.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Meet the Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen

More: Lost Knowledge: Manual TypewritersVintage typewriter repair kitTypewriter repair shop

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Aw, man, this is almost too good to be true: Makers Market seller LTL PRINTS, a Philadelphia, PA startup company, has scored a license to reprint every card in Topps' famous 1962 trading card series Mars Attacks. LTL has a novel full-color print-on-demand process using environmentally friendly inks, at 1440 dpi, on a 10 mil self-adhesive "fabric paper" substrate that can be removed and repositioned over and over again. He'll sell you any card in the series at your choice of six sizes ranging from one foot to six feet on the long edge, with prices starting at $15. He's also selling complete sets at a steep discount over the per-print price.

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A flame gulper is an old fashioned type of engine also known as a vacuum engine. According to the Wikipedia page, "A mixture of gas and air was drawn into the cylinder and ignited; the mixture expanded and part of it escaped through the exhaust valve; the valve then closed, the mixture cooled and contracted, and atmospheric pressure pushed the piston in." [Thanks, Erik!]

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Designed by San Diego artist Christopher Schaie and crafted from parts milled on his ShopBot CNC robot, this beautiful wood-and-brass irising shutter is to be installed, with a glass dome on one side, to serve as the peephole in a nautical-themed door he is building for his studio. Details, including DXF files, in this thread on the ShopBot forum.

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Found in the MAKE Flickr pool:

Mario Caicedo Langer of Bogotá, Colombia, built this excellent prop weapon called the Pistol WTF 2000 that packs light and sound effects. (Click on the image for a bigger pic.)

MATERIALS: My old heat gun (RIP), pieces of video camera, industrial plastic rollers, toilet tank tree, blender glass funds. Coming to Instructables.

(I wanted to call it "Plasma Pistol Ejector Organic Fabric and ash, but my brother said that the acronym PEPITO was a household name ...)

(Translated by Google Translate)

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The Incredible San Fancisco Artists' Soapbox Derby, 1975 via Kottke.

Stumbled across and purchased an actual print of this film back in SF while working on a project for the SF MOMA. Amanda Pope did a great job capturing the spirit of creativity and the event itself. I wonder where all of these cars are today?

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This Instructable details how to build a Stirling engine out of a few soda cans, a balloon, and some terminal blocks (and other bits and pieces). Power is provided by tea candles. In the second vid, the builder uses his engine to power a radio.

Build a Coke Can Stirling Engine

More: How-To Tuesday: Teacup Stirling engine

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue! Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, Subscribe to MAKE, or Access the digital edition (if you're already a subscriber). In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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The Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE Volume 17

One of the perks of this job is unexpectedly getting review copies of books in the mail. A few days ago, a package from Princeton Architectural Press got plunked down on my doorstep (always a joyful sound). I've been absolutely enthralled by its contents ever since I pulled it from the padded envelope.

Cartographies of Time, by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, literally impresses you with its point from the moment you take it in-hand. Subtitled "A History of the Timeline," the book itself is corrugated with horizontally-embossed lines on its covers. The effect is delightful (signaling right up front that this book is something special) and things just keep getting better as you travel deeper into the text.

Those lines on the cover begin the journey of mapping time, which threads its way through the book's surprisingly engaging text and images (the book itself being a meta-timeline). Cartographies of Time is absolutely gorgeous (the NY Times book blog called it possibly the most beautiful book of the year), with lots of illustrations and photographs showing how humans (of the European persuasion, anyway) have chosen to depict the flow of time and the events that we anchor to it. I was shocked to discover that the first evidence of the use of timelines as we know them only dates back 250 years. The book looks at timeline antecedents, in annals, chronologies, and other pre-timeline technologies, and how the emergence of printing, scientific research methods of the 18th century, and the work of timeline pioneers such as Joseph Priestley, helped establish the visual vocabulary of time-mapping that we recognize today.

1672 -- In Johannes Buno's universal history, every millennium before Christ is figured as a large allegorical image, such as the dragon of the fourth millennium depicted here.

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Big fish caught by electrocution (1931). People seem to have a different relationship with fish and electricity in the 30s.

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Steampunk Stormtrooper, Boba Fett, and Princess Leia.

The helmet was created for the TK Helmet Project, a charity event that the 501st Stormtooper Legion is holding for the Make A Wish Foundation. Check out more photos after the jump, including other photos from the week which include Steampunk cosplay photos of Princess Leia and Boba Fett, and a Steampunk-ified version of the Iron Man Helmet.

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More info on their website.

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