Awesome How To Make Everything

In the first of a series of videos from How to Make Everything, host Andy George delves into the history of gunpowder. He then uses a concoction of ingredients to power a series of primitive weapons that came long before the advent of guns or cannons. We’re betting a lot of bad things happened to the people who were figuring this all out in ancient China.

While best known for his paintings, Leonardo DaVinci also invented many imaginative machines. Among his ideas was a crazy weapon that could fire 16 crossbows in a row. How to Make Everything took DaVinci’s drawings and built a real-world replica of the weapon. It works surprisingly well, but loading the thing seems like a precarious process.

Fossil fuels come from decomposing plants and animals found in the earth’s crust. But is it possible to make your own gasoline from the grass in your backyard? Andy from How to Make Everything and CuriosityStream conducted an experiment using grass clippings to see if he could power a lawnmower with the fuel he made.

How to Make Everything has dedicated their YouTube channel to creating objects from scratch. They’re working on a firebox that can be used as a pottery kiln and eventually for hotter tasks like glass-blowing. Naturally, they even created their own firebricks. As their first low-temp test, they used it to cook (er, burn) pizza.

The pulp that goes into making paper comes from trees. But there’s a big difference between the way a paper mill churns out bleached white sheets, and the steps required to make paper from scratch. How To Make Everything walks us through the process. It took about 28 hours of labor to produce their first crude sheet.

How to Make Everything used traditional techniques to construct a set of realistic ancient Greek armor using a fabric made from flower stems, along with cow leather. After testing how well it protected from period weaponry, they decided to see if it could also stop a bullet.

You can grab a pack of instant ramen and nuke it in about 3 minutes. But Andy from How to Make Everything wanted to see if he could make his own instant noodles and seasoning packet from scratch, using only primitive techniques that would have been available when noodles first came on the scene back in the Bronze Age.