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Awesome Building

10 LEGO Elevator Designs

10 LEGO Elevator Designs

After testing various LEGO door mechanisms, the Brick Experiment Channel is back with another series of engineering tests using LEGO and Technic parts. While most of their brick-built elevator and lift designs are motorized, one of them runs on pneumatic power. That scissor lift and rotating lift inspired by Scotland’s Falkirk Wheel are really neat.

No-Nails Survival Shelter

No-Nails Survival Shelter

We may take the roof over our heads for granted these days, but in the 18th century, families venturing into the interior of North America had to build their own shelters to survive the elements as they headed westward. Frontier lifestyle expert Jon Townsend shows us how they might have constructed a shelter without any nails.

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Building a Tiny House from Pallet Wood

Building a Tiny House from Pallet Wood

We’ve seen shipping pallets recycled into coasters, pencils, a guitar, and skateboards. Bushcraft builder Lesnoy went above and beyond by making an entire tiny house primarily from reclaimed pallet wood. Watch and enjoy this soothing video as he builds a dwelling from scratch in the woods.

House of a Thousand Knots

House of a Thousand Knots

This fascinating video from the Institute of Nomadic Architecture takes us to a Kenyan village, where the women come together to build a shelter for the community. These domed structures are made by twisting and knotting found materials like tree trunks, palm fronds, dry grasses, vines, and other organic fibers.

Building a Brick Hut from Scratch

Building a Brick Hut from Scratch

Primitive Technology continues to fill the forest with hand-built structures, though this time, his technique results in a more permanent shelter. He starts by making his own bricks from scratch, firing them in the kiln he built, then stacking them, filling the joints with wood ash cement, and topped it off with a roof of handmade clay tiles.

Making a Thatched Roof Workshop

Making a Thatched Roof Workshop

If you’re going to live off the land and build everything from scratch, you should probably start by building a shelter. Primitive Technology shows us how he made a large shelter out of skinny tree trunks and the leaves of native plants. It’s not only big enough to sleep under; it’s got space for him to work on other projects.

Building with Hemp Bricks

Building with Hemp Bricks

Just BioFiber makes sustainable building materials from hemp plants, lime, and a biocomposite frame. The bricks stack like giant LEGO blocks up to 30 feet high, are as strong as concrete, and are self-insulating. Exploring Alternatives met with BioFiber President Terry Radford for a look at this innovative construction material.

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LEGO Concrete Casting

LEGO Concrete Casting

LEGO bricks are great for building all kinds of things, but did you know you could use them as a mold for casting concrete? Neither did we. HomeMadeModern shows us a couple of techniques – one in which the blocks are used as a direct mold, and the other where the bricks are covered in silicone, which becomes the mold.

Building a Mini Suspension Bridge

Building a Mini Suspension Bridge

Ouroboros ARQ loves to build miniature structures using full-size construction techniques. For this project, they built a scale version of a suspension bridge, complete with steel-reinforced concrete pillars, and dozens of meticulously-threaded wires to support its paved roadway and guard rails.

LEGO Bridge Factory

LEGO Bridge Factory

LEGO machine makers The Brick Wall have outdone themselves with their latest construction. This enormous and complex Technic machine is engineered to automatically install a bridge. It first deploys and positions its support towers, then gradually adds the bridge deck and roadway for vehicles to drive over.

Making Scorpion’s Chainlink Kunai

Making Scorpion’s Chainlink Kunai

With an appropriately R-rated Mortal Kombat movie dropping on April 23, HBO Max enlisted the help of Hacksmith Industries to build a working replica of one of the franchise’s more recognizable weapons. Scorpion’s unique gauntlet lets him fire a kunai-style projectile at his victims, then retract them with a chain.

Building a Bamboo Villa

Building a Bamboo Villa

Despite being made almost entirely out of bamboo, this unique handmade home has a contemporary aesthetic. The guys from Primitive Survival Tool spent about 60 days in the woods building this villa from scratch. It’s not obvious at first glance, but it actually has a basement with a bedroom hidden inside.

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Building a Guitar with One Hand

Building a Guitar with One Hand

Luthier and carpenter tchiksguitars recently injured his wrist and spent 8 weeks wearing a cast that prevented him from using his left hand to grip things. But that didn’t stop him from building this beautiful ash wood guitar, which he made almost entirely with hand tools, with no CNC machining or resin casting.

“Invisible” PC: Part 2

“Invisible” PC: Part 2

After building a high-end gaming PC into a desk, Matt of DIY Perks realized the illusion is completely ruined when placing a monitor on top of it. So he made a hidden ultrawide display that stows inside of a matching wood veneer and aluminum bookshelf. Now he just needs an invisible keyboard and mouse.

Building a Mini Concrete Dam

Building a Mini Concrete Dam

In the real world, we use dams to control water flow, as well as to store it, and to generate electricity. Creative Construction Channel’s miniature dam model isn’t designed to serve such world-serving purposes, but it’s a really impressive build and doubles as the coolest tabletop fountain we’ve ever seen.

Making a Really Tiny House

Making a Really Tiny House

Building an actual house requires lots of different skills. OUROBOROS ARQ shows how you can apply the same experience and materials to the creation of a miniature dwelling, as they lay down a concrete and rebar foundation, erect beams and walls, lay bricks and install a tile roof for their literally tiny house.

PasTEX Spaghetti Connectorz

PasTEX Spaghetti Connectorz
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Mom and dad always told you not to play with your food. But we think they’d make an exception for these connectors that let you build structures using dry spaghetti. They come in 3-sided and 4-sided versions, in packages of 100 connectors each. Just don’t boil your noodles if you care about structural integrity.

Building a Giant Pin Tumbler Lock

Building a Giant Pin Tumbler Lock

A pin tumbler is one of the simpler lock designs out there. But it definitely takes some skill to build one from scratch. Watch as FarmCraft101 puts his carpentry and engineering skills to the test with a working 10x scale lock made from wood, complete with a giant key to lock and unlock it. It’s way too easy to pick though.

Satisfying Plank Collapse

Satisfying Plank Collapse

Hobbyist Crouzier Benjamin loves to build complex structures using thousands of Kapla wooden planks. For this build, he took about 2 weeks assembling 20,000 of the beams, then watched it all fall in about 30 seconds. Check out his YouTube playlist for lots of other fun architectural collapses.

Building a Cruise Ship

Building a Cruise Ship

4K time-lapse footage of the construction of AIDA Cruises new flagship AIDAprima as it was built at the Koyagi Plant of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagasaki, Japan. It’s mindblowing to see such an awesome and massive vessel emerge from the bare drydock.

Kapla Tower Build & Destroy

Kapla Tower Build & Destroy

We weren’t familiar with Kapla blocks before seeing this video, but basically, they’re like longer, flatter Jenga planks for building complex constructions. This large tower and coliseum build took 3 people more than 2 days to build, using over 22000 planks – and it all comes down in seconds.

Geodesic Dome Kit

Geodesic Dome Kit
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Build your own dome-shaped structure with this unique set of connectors. Simply add wooden sticks, and attach Hubs‘ sturdy, adjustable joints to build a geodesic dome in under an hour. The kit supports structures up to about 66 lb, and as big as 16 feet in diameter.

Building a Wigwam

Building a Wigwam

Wigwams are a kind of shelter historically built and lived in by Native Americans and other indigenous people. Watch as members of the Historic Huguenot Street recreate one of the structures by bending tree saplings, and covering them with dried grasses, tree bark, and other natural materials in this enthralling time-lapse.

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