Awesome Custom

YouTuber Not from Concentrate was so disappointed with the “slim” PS5 that he painstakingly showed Sony what a truly compact version of the console should be. The result is a box with almost half the size and nearly 40% of the volume of the PS5 Slim. It even has a removable magnetic charging dock for the controllers and an external disc drive.

This beautifully customized wristwatch from IFL Watches started as a stock Citizen Tsuyosa Automatic with a stainless steel case and link band. What makes it special is the enamel dotting its face, evoking tiny stars and planets. The watch has a 40mm, 21-jewel movement, and a 40-hour power reserve. Just 100 of these hand-painted pieces will be made.

It’s not often we see a truly unique weapon. In this video from maker DiesInEveryFilm, he shows us how he fabricated a custom sling bow from a kid-sized bicycle wheel and steel tubing. It’s held like a pistol and uses elastic tubing like a slingshot but fires full-length arrows. It looks like something that Hawkeye might have in his bag of tricks.

We love IFL Watches’ custom colored G-Shock watches. Good thing they expanded the collection using the thin and sporty 43mm GMA-S2100 as their base. The playful rainbow accents on the dial and bezels contrast nicely with the all black case, but there are also see through and other colorways in the CasiOak Mini Collection.

Jonny Builds shows off another impressive piece of furniture – a record cabinet with a segmented wood door. He started by assembling grain-matched panels for the top, bottom, and dividers. To make the door, he took an 8-foot-long black walnut slab, cut it into boards, sliced it into 109 strips, glued them to canvas, and CNC milled the awesomely wavy shapes.

Normally, if you want a guitar and a bass, those are two instruments. Inspired by a weird prototype guitar shown in the Beatles Get Back documentary, Mattias Krantz engineered this unique guitar with a cylindrical neck that rotates beneath its player’s digits, allowing its player to switch instantly between guitar and bass strings. It’s also got a motor drive.

ViridianChase created this unique gaming computer that looks like a tank. Its case is built from metal with a digital camo pattern and tempered glass windows. It has 13 LED-lit fans, six of which simulate tread wheels. In addition to its fans, it packs NZXT Kraken 360X water cooling, an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, and an ASUS STRIX 6700XT graphics card.

Joerg Sprave is known for his inventive slingshot designs. He’s also into unique weapons. In this video, he shows off a neat custom knife he built with a rack-and-pinion mechanism. It pops open and closes quickly with the flick of a lever. He’s sending the prototype to a professional knifemaker to see if it can be refined and put into production.

Scooters don’t get much more awesome than Pipermoto’s J Series. Created by bike customizer John Piper, this handcrafted scooter not only looks amazing, it’s perfectly balanced and crazy quick. It’s powered by a 690cc KTM LC4 Duke engine that makes 67 hp and zooms from 0-to-60 mph in 4.0 seconds on its way to a top speed of 120 mph.

Over a decade ago, we featured a service that let you make your own Muppet. Sadly, that’s no longer available, but Pubbets are here to make that dream a reality again. The Pubbets Lab lets you customize a full-body puppet’s color, outfit, hair, eyes, nose, glasses, and more. Each puppet has posable hands, internal finger grips, and detachable legs.

Apocalypse Manufacturing’s slant-back Super Truck is built to take on whatever the world (or the end of it) dishes out. The custom truck has a boosted 6.2L Hellcat V8 making 850 hp and sending that to all four wheels. The badass, 240″ long pickup rides on 40″ tires, has a custom steel front end and rear bumper, and can tow up to 15,000 lb.

Most campers sit on the back of a pickup truck or are towed by one. After seeing a Japanese artist’s design for a pedal-powered camper, the Dangie Bros. decided they needed one too. The tiny camper sleeps two in very cramped quarters and weighs about 500 pounds, but they still managed to take it on a (short) road trip.

The first portable computers weren’t exactly compact or lightweight. DIY Perks’ briefcase PC follows in these footsteps, but the payoff for the heft is a high-end gaming PC with a wrap-around 144Hz triple display, a 16-core AMD Ryzen 5950X CPU, an NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU, 64GB of RAM, and a premium audio system with a subwoofer.

Watch shop IFLW and The Dial Artist create customized timepieces by meticulously hand-painting their dials and markers. Among their collection of bespoke G-SHOCK models is this see through “Jellyfish” analog/digital watch with rainbow markings and bezel lettering. It also comes in black or full metal.

Following up on their awesome cyberpunk city and medieval house computer case mods, Martina and Hansi from Nerdforge are back with an aesthetic upgrade for the PlayStation 5. After questioning the uninspiring looks of the console, they transformed it into a dwarven kingdom with molten lava pouring down its sides.

Ram Trucks teamed up with musician Chris Stapleton to create one of the best-looking pickups we’ve seen. Based on the 2500 Heavy Duty, the Traveller features two-tone paint inspired by the 1979 Ram Palomino. It rides on 18″ turbo fin wheels, a custom Ram hood ornament, and 1980s-style badges. It’s even better on the inside.

Since the advent of flat screens, TVs are thinner than ever. But they also keep coming in larger sizes, dominating many living rooms. Matt from DIY Perks wanted to hide his big screen in plain sight. The wall unit he built conceals a 75″ LG QNED mini LED TV, a full home theater sound system, a PS5, a gaming PC, and more.

Totally Handy walks us through the process of building a custom electric bicycle from scratch. In addition to its low-rider style, it has an extra-fat car tire on its rear wheel for added stability. The second part of the video shows off a totally different build – a custom made branding iron made from a melted-down engine.

Inspired by Kirk Hammett’s Wavecaster and John 5’s lava lamp guitar, Astaremi built this custom electric guitar that’s filled with a mix of liquids with different viscosities that produce a colorful wave effect when shaken. He says it’s “heavy as hell,” and we sure hope it never springs a leak.

The Lunar 01 is a customizable 87%-size mechanical keyboard inspired by spaceship design. It has hot-swappable keys, a colorful LED light bar, a volume knob, and detachable fidget spinners that look like rockets. It supports wired and wireless connections and is available with a variety of keycap designs and color schemes.

We’ve seen a lot of cool custom guitar builds over the years, but we’re particularly enchanted by this one. Woodworker Ray Whitby created this beautiful and unique electric guitar from layers of wood and epoxy resin, cut into chevron shapes, assembled and shaped into the guitar’s face, and backlit with LED lighting.

What’s better than a Bentley Continental GT? How about a 6-wheel-drive Bentley lifted for off-road rallying and outfitted with fat tires and skid plates? While we’d love to see a real-world version of this, for now, we’ll have to settle for this sweet custom Hot Wheels car from the Jakarta Diecast Project.

Love Hultén is back with another awesome custom build. The Doodlestation is an analog synthesizer with a playful aesthetic. It combines Sequential, Moog, and Hologram modules, a theremin, and a tape-loop echo. Complementing its easter egg colored keys and patch cables is a visualizer with a dude barfing a rainbow.