Dude Crafts: The Man's Guide to Practical Projects, Backyard Ballistics, and Glorious Gags

by Mike Warren

Dude Crafts is loaded with more than 50 slightly twisted, but somehow useful, projects that will keep crafty men out of trouble (or, sometimes, in it).

Whether making life easier with ingenious hacks or providing self-amusement, the 50 projects presented in Dude Crafts are sure to get any guy's creative wheels turning. These DIY projects will get you on the path to developing your own creations, and impressing your friends.

You'll learn how to: 

• Craft an iPad cover from an old book
• Build a metal forge out of a busted microwave
• Cook a meal in the dishwasher
• Re-purpose an electric saw into a cocktail blender
• Fashion a Swiss army knife for your keys
• Outfit an unsuspecting co-worker’s office chair with an air horn

Each project is accompanied by a parts list and step-by-step photo instructions to get you building; often by hacking subpar stock goods or upcycling discarded objects into functional works of art and conversation pieces. No matter how off-kilter the project may appear on the surface, it's sure to payoff as a useful tool, an art piece, the punch line to a practical joke or, best of all, a combination of all three.

Whatever the motive—to solve a problem, to play a joke, or for self-entertainment—Dude Crafts will get dudes off the sofa and into the workshop!

• ISBN13: 9780760357781
• Publish Date: 4 October 2018 (first published 2 October 2018)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 5 March 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Voyageur Press
• Edition: New Edition
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Dude Crafts is an illustrated tutorial how-to guide with tongue firmly in cheek. The projects are way out there and silly and/or campy. They range from bizarre: a flask hidden inside a realistic baby doll (complete with baby-pack carrier) to the odd: a DIY paracord bullwhip, to the MacGuyverish: PVC freezing tubes for your favorite beverage coolers.

Released 2nd Oct 2018 by Quarto on their Voyageur imprint, it's 192 pages and available in hardcover format.

While this book has a very humorous feel, there are a number of useful items which can be made with the tutorials provided. Keys can be kept together in a swiss-army-knife type contraption, your bottle opener will never go missing again, thanks to neodymium magnets and a disembowled doll/action figure, and several other notable more-or-less utilitarian pieces. There are of course some purely humorous projects: a keen amateur can make a hysterically realistic head-in-a-jar which looks like a friend or coworker, the aforementioned flask in a realistic babydoll in a carrier, and a dinosaur pencil sharpener.

While admittedly there weren't any of the 50 projects which called out to me to be made right away, there certainly were enough nuggets of advice and jumping off points that I'm sure I'll be using some of the ideas in one form or another in the future.

Four stars for the humor and wacky ideas.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes