Awesome Machines

Jared Owen always does a great job explaining how things work by creating 3D animations of their inner workings. This time, he walks us through the caterpillar-tracked M1A2 Abrams tank, which weighs in at an incredible 68 tons, and can cross just about any terrain. We had no idea these things were powered by jet fuel.

To prove how fast and durable the Kennametal HPR drill bit is, the guys from Titans of CNC: Academy programmed one of their machines to drill a perfect grid of 672 holes in a block of cast iron. The tool moves at an impressive 103 inches-per-minute, drilling 1.85″ deep holes over and over again without wearing down.

Stuck at home under quarantine, builder Colin Furze was feeling restless, so he decided to piece something together from items he had around his shop. The monstrosity you see here is a plastic shark head that Colin retrofitted with a 10-ton hydraulic jack and pointy metal teeth. Let the crushing begin!

Boston bagel chain Finagle a Bagel slices its bagels in the best possible way. After each bagel ordered is placed onto a conveyor belt, it heads into a rapidly-spinning circular saw blade, which cuts the bagel in half and flings it towards the cashier at lightning speed.

Normally, if you want to blow big bubbles, you need to dip a bubble wand in a pool of soap bubbles. But designer pojken shows off a fun and easy gizmo that uses a pressurized garden sprayer, a wand, and a string frame to continuously feed giant bubbles on demand. Learn to build your own on Instructables.

Machine shop DataPro shares hypnotic footage of a Datron CNC milling machine, as it takes a disc of aluminum and transforms it into a precise and smoothly formed gear. It was shot as a time-lapse, but won’t it be awesome when machines can do this in real time?

After building a LEGO machine that cuts gift wrap to the proper size for packages, The Brick Wall made good on their promise to build a machine that takes care of the wrapping too. It’s an impressive work of LEGO engineering, and we must have one of these before next Christmas comes around.

LEGO builder AstonishingStudios wants to eventually build a machine that can cook and assemble an entire Egg McMuffin. First on the list – a robot that breaks open an egg and separates it from its shell. It can also split up its yolk and its white. The trickiest part was engineering the part that delicately holds the egg and cracks it.

Covering sidewalks and driveways with salt in the wintertime can be a pain. Sure, there are salt spreading machines out there, but how many of them can fly? FliteTest created an over-engineered solution which uses a powerful drone to lift a hopper of salt into the air, then spits it onto the ground below.

Zita and Rafael of Zurich-based animation studio Crictor love to make super-short videos with the goal of making people smile. Previously, they used a blow torch to pop a single kernel of popcorn; now they’re celebrating the new year by blowing streamers into the air with a hairdryer.

It’s always fun to watch stuff tossed into an industrial shredder. In this clip by Gojzer, they load up a machine with all kinds of satisfying stuff, including walnuts, tubes of toothpaste, alarm clocks, old cell phones, and gooey blobs of slime.

Sprice Machines enjoys building overly-complicated machines to perform simple tasks. In this case, he created a machine that takes nearly 3 minutes to toss a toy basketball through a hoop. Like most Rube Goldberg machines, this one took a bit of trial and error. If the NBA played this slowly, games would end with scores like 8-6.

Do you have lots of gifts to wrap? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a machine that could measure and cut paper to exactly the right size? LEGO builder The Brick Wall made just the thing. Simply place a present on the box scanner, and the Mindstorms-controlled machine automatically unrolls the paper and cuts it to size.

To celebrate the holidays in these times of social distancing, Jason Allemann created this little machine that can fling candy canes at a recipient so they don’t have to go rummaging around his candy bowl with their grubby hands. He built the gizmo using the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Set. Full build details here.

Giant wind turbines are a common sight in the countryside, and we’ve occasionally seen them being transported on long flatbeds. But getting their enormous fan blades up a mountain along curvy switchbacks poses a unique set of challenges. This video from China’s CGTN shows just how they do it.

Injection molding is the process of injecting melted plastics into a mold to create parts. It’s typically reserved for large, industrial machines, but the MicroMolder changes that. It can accept aluminum, 3D-printed SLA, or high-temp cast urethane tooling, producing production-quality parts from pellets.