Awesome Machines

Typical 3D printers can output one or two colors at a time, but this 3D printer from Mimaki can print objects from a palette of more than 10 million colors. 3D Printing Nerd got look at its capabilities during Formnext USA. It creates objects by printing layers of UV-curable CMYK resins encased in a water-soluble support material.

The idea of a machine optimized for throwing blades as quickly and accurately as possible seems like a terrible idea. But this is the internet, so someone had to go and make one. Quint BUILDs shows off his dangerous invention, which can launch and fire up to 10 knives with precision and from different distances.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. But instead of just opening the freezer and digging into the container with a spoon, Sprice Machines spent four months building his most complicated Rube Goldberg machine yet. The machine winds through his entire house to serve a single scoop of ice cream with toppings.

Sirgabealot G teamed up with 14 other talented machine builders teamed up to create this 9-minute sequence of chain reaction machines. In all, there are 31 amazing contraptions to watch, incorporating ramps, tracks, turntables, ferris wheels, pool balls, and more.

Wood Marble Machine builds exactly what their YouTube channel name says. This modular machine carries steel ball bearings up a double escalator and then rolls them back down through a series of ramps, bowls, and a spinning pachinko board before doing it all over again. The sounds it makes are wonderfully soothing.

Because he can’t be bothered to feed himself anymore, Joseph of Joseph’s Machines built a conveyor belt to deliver his breakfast. We’re not just talking food rolling along the line, but a series of individual machines designed to stuff food and pour drinks into his mouth. The behind-the-scenes video is great too.

This fascinating piece of industrial equipment from WAFIOS takes thick steel wire and turns it into the kind of heavy-duty coil springs you might see wrapped around a shock absorber. It uses a series of rollers to feed the wire and computer-controlled bending wheels to ensure the precise shape and size of the coil.

It makes perfect sense that you can mill round objects by turning them on a spindle. But this video from the Titans of CNC shows us how it’s possible to use computer-controlled machines to mill sharply-defined polygonal objects on a spinning machine by synchronizing the spindle and the milling tool.

If you’ve ever had a CT (or “CAT”) scan of your body, you know that it makes quite the whirring sound as you slide into its donut-shaped opening. This video captured by a radiographer in Denmark shows just how quickly the machine’s guts spin around as its X-ray beams capture numerous images of your insides.

Traditional ropes are made by winding hemp or other strong plant fibers. NightHawkInLight got his hands on an industrial machine he found on AliExpress that can take fibers like tall grass and braids them together to create rope. It required a bit of fine-tuning to make it work properly, but it did its job in the end.

The Brick Technology channel is always making interesting machines from LEGO Technic parts. In this video, they show off more than two dozen satisfying LEGO mechanisms and then let them self-destruct by overpowering each one. The demolition starts at the 6:23 mark, followed by slow-motion footage.

Now that we’ve got your attention, we’re here to reveal that the hydraulic exosuit that Handy Geng created is not for self-pleasure but for tenderizing beef. It’s still a ridiculous idea, and just the kind of thing we’d expect from the man who gave us the corn on the cob machine. It can also provide massages and chop veggies.

The Brick Wall shows off one of the most impressive LEGO machines ever – a fully-functional washing machine. It uses motors, gears, and wheels to tumble and spin a container filled with clothes. It even dispenses water and detergent and drains the water when done. His solution for drying socks at the end is hilarious.

Once you knock dominoes over, you generally have to set them back up by hand. But in the case of this LEGO Technic machine by Grant Davis, the dominoes stand themselves back upright. Running in an infinite loop of 10 dominoes at a time, it can knock down and stand up dominoes at a rate of 120,000 per day.

Brick Science host Riley Scott wanted to see if he could build a flight simulator out of LEGO bricks. With the help of his friends Christian and Marcel, they came up with a tabletop machine with a remote joystick and throttle which control the airplane’s propellor, pitch, and roll. Its motors are controlled by a Mindstorms EV3 module.

Brick Technology answers the question “Can LEGO play the drums?” with a resounding “Yes.” He built this LEGO Technic machine using a series of levers that tap switches, triggering a digital drum machine. Like a music box or player piano, it uses a series of bumps on a rolling track to tell it which buttons to tap.

Germany’s Fatzer Brugg is one of the world’s leading producers of industrial wire rope. These thick braids of wire come together to form incredibly strong cables which are used for gondolas, ropeways, and bridges. This short clip shows one of the machines they use to twist together spools of wire to form a finished rope.

Typical LEGO machines use motors to directly drive gears or belts. Brick Technology shows us how LEGO parts can be assembled to move pistons to move a crankshaft, which spins gears attached to a wheel or propeller. They start out with a 1-cylinder engine and gradually ramp it up to a 12-cylinder radial airplane engine.

2in1 Bricking loves to create LEGO machines that can walk or drive. This particular model is designed to amble along the ground no matter which edge it’s placed on. Can you imagine giant robots or vehicles getting around like this?

Over the years, the Hydraulic Press Channel has performed numerous destructive experiments under the crushing force of their 150-ton press. This video compiles ten times things went differently than anticipated, including dangerous explosions, broken windows, and even watermelon rain.

These days, the military uses powerful computers and high-end graphics cards to simulate missions. But in the 1970s, one of the ways to simulate driving a tank was using a miniature city, a motion camera rig, and a remote screen that displayed the first-person perspective to the pilot. Tom Scott took this vintage sim for a ride.

We’re not sure if we should be amazed by or terrified by Advanced.Farm’s wheeled robot that autonomously harvests apple crops. Its six mechanical arms are fitted with custom-built stereoscopic cameras to identify ready-to-pick apples, then pluck them off with their grippers. The machine can pick roughly 30 apples per minute.

It’s amazing how water can be pressurized so much that it can cut through things. In this clip we spotted on the Tool Gifs subreddit, we get an up-close look at how a tightly-focused stream of water can cut incredibly precise shapes in stone. The footage does appear to have been sped up, though.