Awesome Engineering

While we have gotten some enjoyment from robots playing music, they’ll never replace human artistry. Engineer Michael Kuzma created his self-playing guitar to see how far he could push electromechanical music-making. Samurai Guitarist sat down with Kuzma to hear about its development and to listen to what the robot is capable of.

Engineers have come up with all kinds of pencil sharpeners. Shane from Stuff Made Here used his engineering expertise to see if he could come up with some new ways to achieve the sharpest point for his pencils. His six ridiculous pencil sharpeners include a 5-axis waterjet, a robot with a spinning X-acto blade, and a tiny chainsaw.

While an all-terrain personal mobility device sounds like a good idea, we’re not sure that boots that drive like tanks are the best way to get around. Joel Creates shows off his design for a wearable off-road vehicle that’s totally impractical yet extraordinarily cool to see in action. They’d balance way better if they had longer tracks.

Consumer 3D printers are great for producing small objects, but for larger things, you need to either buy a massive industrial printer or use one of those special printers that can print onto a moving belt. Emily the Engineer did neither of those things and instead modded a cheap 3D printer by adding long aluminum rails to extend its range of motion.

Engineer Tom Stanton is fascinated by the way in which flywheels can store up energy as they’re spun up to speed. In this clip, he combines a flywheel mechanism with a sturdy aluminum trebuchet, creating a durable machine that can toss a tennis ball at fast as 180 mph.

Mark Rober and his pals made one of the largest NERF guns ever. This time, he went in the opposite direction, putting the popular toy through the shrink ray so many times it’s only visible with an atomic force microscope. After using a compliant mechanism to engineer a simplified version that can fire a dart, he worked with scientists to make NERF guns from DNA.

After seeing a video of an artist making string art portraits, engineer Paul Morris Hill wanted to see if he could achieve a similar effect with a machine. This video chronicles some of the trial and error he worked through developing the machine and its software, eventually arriving at a system using a grid of nails. Paul posted a full build log on Medium.

While so-called hoverboards don’t hover how we want them to, they’re still fun to ride. James Bruton thought he could make something more interesting than an off-the-shelf balance board. So he got to work making a hoverboard with 3D-printed omni-wheels. His chunky machine is built for a seated rider, and he plans to upgrade it to make it more agile.

Make It Extreme has a thing for building unique single-passenger vehicles. Their latest creation is a motorized bike that rolls on a single tread. It’s powered by what appears to be a moped engine. The motor is rigged up to spin a custom-milled drive wheel that pulls the tread extracted from a car tire along a set of rollers. It’s even equipped with a full suspension.

Mathematician and maker Henry Segerman shows off more of his fascinating interactive mechanisms. This series of interlocking straight gears uses a rack-and-pinion mechanism to transmit motion. Henry posted the models to 3D print your own recursive racks on Printables.

Engineer James Bruton has built a variety of interesting robotic vehicles over the years, including an omnidirectional tank that moved around on three tracks. But that design had difficulty climbing uneven terrain, so he took his readers’ suggestions on the track design and made an improved version that’s a bit more agile.

Engineering geeks will get a kick out of this video from the Brick Experiment Channel. Using LEGO Technic components, they demonstrated various mechanical principles, including a Schmidt coupling, a Scotch yoke, and a Chebyshev lambda linkage. Even if you don’t know what any of that means, it’s fun to watch.

Mad scientist Mike Ando aka RIUM+ created a unique display inspired by the holographic imagers in the adventure game Riven: The Sequel to Myst. His patent-pending Andotrope has a cylindrical display that spins with the turn of a crank, and displays an image that appears to follow you no matter what angle you view it from. Works great for Princess Leia, too.

Bottle flipping is so 2016. But that didn’t stop Zac Alsop from bringing the trend back for an epic send-off. He teamed up with the guys from Sent Into Space to launch a water bottle to the edge of space. They came up with an over-engineered solution that keeps the bottle spinning, drops it close to Earth via parachute, then detaches for its final approach.

Inspired by the expensive airless tires seen on construction equipment and concept vehicles, The Q set out on a mission to make his own shock-absorbing, puncture-proof bike tires using a similar design. What’s even more impressive is that he built them using only PVC pipe, nuts, bolts, and the tread from a standard bike tire.

Those CO2 cartridges used to carbonate beverages store a lot of pressure in a small space. Inspired by the Backyard Scientist’s CO2-powered rocket, Sam Barker wanted to see if the same forces could lift a model airplane into the sky. He used lightweight plastic to 3D print the plane, which he quickly wrecked by flying it into a brick wall.

Engineer and maker Allen Pan will be the first to tell you he’s not exactly the Man of Steel. That didn’t stop him from taking on some of the beefiest arm wrestlers on Muscle Beach. But Allen gave himself an advantage – a custom exoskeleton to dramatically increase his arm strength. Can it help him beat the pros without ripping off his own arm?

Ryder Calm Down loves to make things. Inspired by how dot-matrix printers lay down ink, he built an oversized print head that attaches to the back of his pickup truck and sprays out water droplets at the right time to create letters and numbers. The system uses a Raspberry Pi to control relays and solenoids that open and close valves.

We’ve featured some really interesting mechanisms created with LEGO Technic parts. But the ones we’ve seen before are usually shown as separate, disconnected systems. Brick Machines built more than 40 different kinds of mechanisms and combined them into a single, compact machine.

Inspired by a pair of Civil War-era bullets that collided and fused together, Destin from Smarter Every Day wanted to see if he could replicate the unlikely situation on camera. It took an impressive amount of planning and engineering to set up the shot and perform the experiment in a safe and precise way.

Those Kenner Star Wars AT-AT toys were awesome to play with, but we had to use our imaginations to get them to walk as they did in The Empire Strikes Back. For engineer James Bruton, that wasn’t good enough, so he got to work rebuilding a version of the imperial walker with a servo-powered drivetrain that lets it really walk.

Modern crash test dummies are shockingly expensive to buy. Engineer James Bruton didn’t have a spare million bucks lying around, so he decided to build his own. He made his dummy from wood, metal, 3D-printed plastic, and rubber. While it isn’t quite as refined as the industry-standard units, it’s fully outfitted with sensors like the real deal.

After realizing how much time he spends on his phone, JBV Creative was inspired to build an electro-mechanical artwork as a commentary on the distracted nature of today’s gadget-dependent society. The finished piece features a group of phone-holding figures that wobble along on a conveyor belt, smash into a wall, fall down, and do it all over again.