Hilarious, ingenius . . . and far from PC

Vinyl Record Bowl, one of the quirky DIY projects in Mike Warren’s Dude Crafts book.

Be warned — Dude Crafts is not a PC book. Author Mike Warren comes up with over 50 eccentric, quirky, bizarre but useful projects that will make you laugh and cringe at the same time . . .

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

Whether making life easier with ingenious hacks or providing self-amusement, the 50 projects presented in Dude Crafts are sure to get some guys’ creative wheels turning.

These DIY projects will get blokes on the path to developing their own creations, and impressing their friends.

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 pay off 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.

There are ideas for making beer advent calendars using shipping tubes, a bottle bandolier out of your old jeans, cooking lasagne in the dishwasher, using an electric jigsaw as a martini shaker, and the most cringeworthy of all, using a hollowed out baby doll to sneak “beverages” into sports arenas and movie theatres.

Then there are the jokes: outfitting an unsuspecting co-worker’s office chair with an air horn, the elaborate head-in-a-jar trick using digital photography and spilling fake spilled coffee on a laptop.

It’s hilarious, ingenious and wicked — a great gift idea for the DIY bloke in your life

. . . if you dare.

Mike Warren is a designer and inventor based in San Francisco. His work combines electronics, woodworking, and reuse. His open-source work is carefully documented to inspire and encourage others to remix his projects and share the results. Warren won The New York Times Innovation Whiteboard in 2012 for his umbrella light (an illumination device retrofitted into the shaft of an umbrella to indicate location to others in the dark) and was the favourite selected by James Dyson. Warren is also the author of a maker book for young adults, 23 Things to Do Before You are 11½, among other titles, and served as the technical editor for the young adult fiction Dewey Mac, Kid Detective. His work has been featured in Popular Science, The New York Times, Wired, BoingBoing, Vsauce, and elsewhere. He is currently a designer for Instructables and Autodesk, where he shares DIY tutorials.Dude Crafts: The Man’s Guide to Practical Projects, Backyard Ballistics, and Glorious Gags

by Mike Warren

RRP: $29.99