I would bet at one time or another we have all loaned someone something and had it returned with damage. That is frustrating and the least we expect from those who borrowed it is to fix it for us. That is just want one guy did.

As the story goes, a dude loaned a DSLR to a pal and while the pal had the camera, the control wheel was somehow lost. Rather than return the camera broken, the dude who borrowed it set about crafting his own replacement.

My lawn mower and yours are not very fast. Only as fast as you push it. But Bobby Cleveland’s lawn mower goes fast! Super fast. His DIY project produced a beast that can zing along at 96MPH. I’d hate to get in the way of those blades.

You might lose your head, or an arm, or…everything. I’d also hate to be the rider when it hits a rock or pot hole. Same result. But man that is one fast mower.

I really like to see some of the awesome DIY stuff that geeks come up with and when that stuff has to do with Star Wars it’s even better. A dude has created his own DIY R2D2 bot that is larger than the actual robot so the guy can fit inside the ting to drive it.

The replica of R2D2 has a flip up dome that the guy climbs into. Once inside the robot he activate sound effects and somehow control how the thing moves around. It has fans inside too to keep the geek cool.

Give a geek some hardware, a bit of extra time, and a need for speed and they can come up with anything. A dude named Barry Lee has constructed his own mini dragster using six circular saws for power. The saws are 16-inch Makita units.

The dragster was created for a cool competition in the UK called the Power Tool Drag Racing Championships held in conjunction with the Royal Navy and Five’s Gadget Show. The dragsters will compete against other DIY types and power tool companies for the win.

Coffee tables don’t have to be boring. This one will provide much more fun than just a place to put your books and coffee mugs on it. A fellow named zieak created this amazing table, after picking up a pinball machine from the dump.

He basically transferred the playing surface of the old pinball machine (with some LEDs) into a coffee table. And now I want to do the same.

The Nexus One might not take the kind of macro photos that your DSLR is capable of, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still take good macro shots with a little bit of DIY elbow grease. Check out this handy macro lens attachment for the Nexus One.

The lens comes from a pair of mini binoculars, and is fastened to a mounting bracket using epoxy putty. You’ll notice the 3.5mm male plug, which holds the lens securely in place and also keeps it removable.

We all know that the Doctor’s TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Now we know just how big it is. One terabyte. That should be pretty roomy for any toy figures that Max Shanly wants to cram inside his TARDIS.

It took some hard work and probably a sonic screwdriver to get the drive in there, but it’s totally worth it. Now Max is working on hooking up the flashing light up top for hard drive activity.

This DIY meat smoker is a must make. Real men need meat. And they need to know when it is done. Simple as that. And so this meat smoker will alert you via a text message whenever your meat is ready. Peter Rauch decided to use a proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller which can modulate electrical power to a heating element.

It even has a touchscreen display that allows you to adjust the controller, while a J-type thermocouple located in the top of the smoker delivers a voltage signal for the feedback loop to control the temperature. When you combine meat with tech, the results are delicious.

Many of us have tons of VHS tapes laying around the house, even today. Here’s a great project that will help you better use them. This VHS coffee table was created using 92 old VHS tapes as the table’s base.

It’s a great way to recycle all those old VHS tapes lying around. It’s not like you are ever going to watch them again anyway, since the quality is so bad. Might as well decorate with them.

The A3-21 Plasma Rifle kicks ass in Fallout 3 and it looks pretty awesome in the real world too. Ryan Palser created this bad boy, which took five months to complete. His wife painted it up real nice to give it the weathered look. If they ever make a Fallout movie, they better turn to Ryan and wife for props.

We’d love to see more of Fallout’s weapons in real life, maybe even some Brotherhood of Steel armor. To paraphrase the song from the game, Ryan doesn’t want to set the world on fire, he just wants to start a flame in our hearts with this beast.

We’ve seen plenty of painted and modded Xbox 360s in our day, even an Xbox 360 laptop, but until now we’ve never seen what Tony Stark’s Xbox 360 looks like.

And thanks to Zachariah Perry Cruse, we now know. It looks just like his armor. The design student spent his summer vacation creating his very own Iron Man Xbox 360. It’s not the slim 360 console, but it has a 120GB hard drive and an HDMI socket. Why not place a bid?

Voting machines are pretty unreliable and prone to being easily hacked, so it wasn’t that hard to hack this Sequoia AVC EDGE voting machine to play Pac-Man. Pac-Man isn’t all that different from politics anyway. You have one bloated yellow bastard gobbling up all of the wealth and resources, while we all play the ghosts who try to stop them.

The machine has had it’s memory card formatted, installing DOS and MAME. It has had it’s share of rigged votes, no doubt, but now it can right that wrong by providing some fun.

I once volunteered to build some of those desks that you have to construct out of all the little pieces of MDF and tons of screws and cam locks. I have also built my share of entertainment centers from the same stuff before. They are all a massive pain and take forever to finish.

Sceptre is a company we have talked about before and is best known for its cheap and cool LCD TVs and computer screens. Sceptre has announced that it will be getting into the entertainment center furniture business with a line of assembly required offerings needing no tools to build.

There are Star Wars fans, and then there are Star Wars fans who bring a bit of the Star Wars universe into our own. Craig Smith is in the latter group as evidenced by his X-wing mailbox. It may lack an astromech droid, but since it doesn’t actually leave it’s post I guess it doesn’t need one.

Pretty awesome. The force is strong in this one. I would personally make a tie fighter and put it right next to this one for the junk mail.

Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots have gone all futuristic on us. Zachery Shivers and Anne Flinchbaugh have created a motion-controlled version of the game as part of Texas Instruments’ Co-op Design Challenge. This version, unlike the original has plenty of servos and circuit boards underneath the ring.

But the main event here is TI’s accelerometer-equipped Chronos watch, which lets you translate actual punches into rock ‘em sock ‘em punches. Awesome.