Awesome Hacks

If you split a wheel in half, you shouldn’t still be able to ride on it, right? Well, watch this video from The Q, in which he cut two bike wheels and tires down the middle, connected them with a long chain and positioned them so one half is always touching the ground. Miraculously, the bike rides just fine.

Because of their size and weight, chainsaws typically require both hands for safe operation. Make It Extreme shows how it’s possible to engineer and construct a compact chainsaw small enough to be held with one hand, yet capable of sawing through thick branches and making very rough cuts of lumber.

We always figured if you were going to upgrade the plastic case on a handheld game system, you’d want to go for aluminum or maybe carbon fiber. But Peter Knetter is a bit of a contrarian, so he downgraded his GameBoy Advance SP by building it a case, buttons, and D-pad out of cardboard.

The crank on a typical 10-speed bicycle measures about 5″ across. But what would happen if you supersize that? BigWR gives us a lesson in gear ratios by outfitting his bike’s crankset with an enormous gear to see how much faster it could go on pedal power alone. At least it’s not as bad of an idea as his double steering bike.

Handy Geng wanted to know what it was like to feel weightless. But since he’s not planning on heading to space any time soon, he decided to build a machine that approximates that sensation on Earth. The vomit-inducing car has a cylindrical passenger compartment that can flip 360º. The faster it’s driven, the quicker it spins.

Despite its acceleration abilities, the Tesla Model S is a relativelt tame-looking car from the outside. But that all changed after The Real Life Guys got their hands on one. The German YouTubers took a Model S and converted it into a Model T by lifting it more than two feet and equipping it with tank tracks. Turn on subtitles.

Attending Zoom calls without pants is a common occurrence. It’s fine if you stay put, but you run the risk of exposure if you move around. Fletcher at Everything Is Hacked has the solution. He used OpenCV, MediaPipe, and pyvirtualcam to create a video filter that adds pants or blurs your naughty bits if you’re letting it all hang out.

Do you suck at first-person shooters? Kamal Carter might have the solution. He built a servo-controlled robotic rig that moves a mouse exactly where targets are by scanning the screen for specific colors. It cheats quite well in the FPS trainer AimLab, but it’ll need more work to be accurate in a real game.

The Language Master and similar devices used magnetic cards to help students learn to speak other languages. The vintage machines have become a favorite among musicians for making lo-fi sounds by adjusting their speed and direction, and even making loops. Hainbach shows off some of their beat-making abilities.

Typically, when you want to input text into a computer, you need a keyboard or dictation software. But Fletcher over at Everything Is Hacked wanted to type without using his hands or making a sound, so he got to coding an application that can interpret facial gestures and convert them into keypresses.

Inspired by LockPickingLawyers‘ videos showing how to use a gunpowder-loaded nail gun to break padlocks, The Backyard Scientist wanted to build something a bit more powerful. His goal? Build a weapon that can punch and smash through bricks. It’s also way better at breaking locks, and works as a demolition tool.

The guys from Electronicos Fantasticos! are no strangers to making electronic music with unusual instruments. Here, they show off a custom-built instrument that clangs the bell of an old-school rotary telephone with a circuit controlled by a Korg SQ-1 step sequencer. Now they need to rig the dial with a motor and amplify its clicks.

If you’ve got kids, you can bet LEGO bricks will be scattered all over the floor at some point. Inspired by David Wallace’s idea on The Office, Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions built a shop vacuum attachment that sucks up all of the loose LEGO bricks and automatically sorts them by size.

If you want a loud noisemaker, you could always buy one of those compressed air horns, but if you prefer something that you can reuse over and over, check out HABU’s build – which uses a modded cordless power drill and a small compressor pump to blow air through a pair of horns.

The Q typically spends his time building things that aren’t particularly useful. But this time out, he came up with a design for a saw that can cut through tree limbs twice as fast as usual. The saw uses a pair of blades and a spring to clamp down against the wood to double cutting speed.

If you search around on Amazon, you can find some pretty big portable power banks. But Handy Geng needs more milliamp hours of power, so he got to building this enormous power pack that has batteries totaling 27,000,000 mAh (or 27,000 amp-hours) of power output. And yes, it’s still portable, kinda.

Musician Michael Wilbur of the band Moon Hooch shows off some of the fantastically fuzzy bass notes you can make by stuffing a tall traffic cone into the bell of a saxophone. And that’s not the only way that you can make funky saxocone music.

Are you sick and tired of people driving too slow in the passing lane? Perhaps this will convince them to move over. This Russian mechanic modded a Lada, replacing its headlights with a pair of road-clearing flamethrowers. We can only hope that it’s operated by honking the horn.

Handy Geng was tired of getting off of his scooter to open the gates to his workshop, so he decided to motorize one of them. Rather than use an off-the-shelf motor, he rigged up a mount and attached his scooter to do the work. Now he needs to buy a second scooter to ride through the gate. English subtitles available.

RCLifeOn built a unique drawing machine that creates geometric illustrations on a sheet of acrylic using a fluorescent marker. Bright LED lights help the images glow brilliantly. For now, images must be manually erased between drawings, but they plan on adding an eraser mechanism at some point.

Handy Geng is back with another one of his crazy inventions that nobody asked for – a combination barbeque grill cart and electric piano. As he plays each key on the piano, it rotates a skewer of meat over its charcoal pit, ensuring its cooked evenly on each side. Oh, and it drives. English captions available, but not necessary.

A hurdy-gurdy is a musical instrument that makes sounds by rubbing a spinning bow against its strings. Vinheteiro made a low-budget approximation of the instrument by combining a fishing reel with an acoustic guitar. His version only has one string, and the sound it produces is like a kind of traditional Asian music.

If you’ve ever tried to watch TV outdoors, you know that the picture washes out in the sun. DIY Perks shows us how he built a custom outdoor TV by hacking a grid of bright LED lighting onto the back of an LCD panel recycled from a broken TV. To keep it from overheating, he built a water-cooling system using a pump and a car radiator.

The scene in Beetlejuice where the Maitland’s possess the dinner party and make their unwanted houseguests sing “Day-O” is a classic. Now imagine if the same thing happened to a school of Big Mouth Billy Basses, and you’d have this video. You’re welcome.

Remember that time Colin Furze built a ridiculously tall bicycle? Well, The Real Life Guys have outdone that by some measure. After being set loose in the Urban-Drivestyle bike factory, they fabricated a 16-foot-tall bicycle with seating for six. The video is in German, but insane builds are a universal language.

So what could be better than a crappy old Italian car with eight wheels? How about an even crappier old Russian car with six more wheels? Thanks to the insane minds at Garage 54, your dream has come true – assuming that dream includes six axles and giant tractor wheels on front.