This week on Maker Update: A battery powered fume extractor, robots made of spiders, hacking a cyberpunk e-bike, and the largest collection of armorer’s tools in the world.

This week on Maker Update: cranking up the light pipes, battling gourd bots, animatronics for your 12-ft skeleton, digital techniques for foam, bobblehead bots, and a teeny tiny TV.

This week on Maker Update, a Neural Synthesizer from Google, a 3D printed horse, welding plastic, a charcoal fume extractor, a constellation necklace, extending your drill by a foot, Eagle 9, and soldering unicorns. This week’s Cool Tool is the Irwin 12″ bit holder.

This is the Hakko FX-901 portable soldering iron (available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2sh7g0t). It runs off 4 AA batteries that you can swap out really fast with this removable cartridge design. I use rechargeables in mine and I get over an hour of use out of it before I notice the temperature drops. Alkaline batteries will run hotter, but not last as long.

[Editors’ note: This same tutorial was originally published as an Instructable. I’m publishing it here for posterity.]

The quality and design of project boards has become so good in recent years, that I almost feel bad putting them together. In this guide, I’m going to show you a simple soldering technique that can make the back of your boards look as nice as the front. You’ll learn how to make perfectly smooth, consistent solder joints that look impossibly tidy.