Awesome Machines

For their 2014 project Carrara Robotics, Jelle Feringa and Lucas Terhall demonstrated how an Odico architectural robot can be used to cut organic shapes out of marble, as it twists and turns a wet saw blade through a slab of stone like a hot knife through butter. Skip to 1:00.

Brian Leach shows off one of the coolest Meccano builds we’ve ever seen, a fully-functional slot machine built almost entirely from the 1970s metal building toys. More recently, he used the parts to build a Meccano pinball machine.

Full-size tires take up a whole lot of space when being transported or stored. This machine allows multiple tires to take up far less room by folding them up and storing them inside each other. Of course, you’ll need another machine to unpack them.

One of the creepier and more awesome mechanised LEGO builds we’ve seen comes from Darryl Friesen aka Baronworks, who created this chomping sugar skull inspired by the Day of the Dead. The noise its 100 spinning gears only add to the effect.

While this device is designed for folding and packaging shirts for sale, we’d love to have one in our laundry room. Simply place a shirt in the middle of the Speedy-T, and it takes care of neatly folding and stacking shirts like a champ.

JK Brickworks shows off another awesome mechanical build – a fully-functional printer/plotter that uses a pen to draw words and images on a sheet of paper that it feeds using the wheels from a LEGO vehicle, and a Mindstorms’ EV3 controller.

It may look a little bit like a sideways stargate, but this robot is designed to carefully position itself around a Jenga stack, methodically pluck out a wooden block, and move it to the top of the stack. We’d be curious to see if it could play an entire game, but we’re guessing not.

This could be the most complicated clock ever built. We cannot imagine the engineering involved in getting all of its gears, pulleys, and pendulums to work together to tell time. Mark Frank and Buchanan’s masterpiece has been under construction for over a decade.

A brief and silent look at a high speed Tomra Sentinel II optical sorting machine, as it watches thousands of tomatoes whiz by, knocking the rejects off the line so they can be turned into ketchup and other products. The slow-mo bit at 1:14 shows the bad tomatoes getting kicked out.

After six months of work, builder Ben Tardif is close to putting the finishing touches on his latest marble machine – a miniature version of a miniature golf course. The video goes into quite some depth about the build, but if you just want to see it in action, you can skip to 15:20.

Similar, but larger than JK Brickworks’ drawing machine, VBs LEGO Technic Creations contraption draws by moving a pen in its arms, while rotating a turntable that holds the paper. It appears to be able to draw much more intricate patterns than the smaller machine.

Techmoan checks out an awesomely complex bit of 1970s tech. The Panasonic RS-296US used a mechanical carousel filled with 20 extra-long cassette tapes to allow for up to 2.5 days of continuous music. There was no way to select individual tracks, but you could choose tapes.

After discovering the hydraulic crimping machines at Lillbacka Powerco, the guys from Beyond the Press decided to subject a whole bunch of balls to the deadly force of one of these impressive machines. The rubber band ball was particularly satisfying.

A fun kit which lets you build your own motorized wooden marble machine. It sends a cascade of spheres spiraling to the bottom, then finding their way back to the top for an perpetual loop of marble madness. Available as a battery-powered or solar version.

Paweł Zadrożniak’s incredible orchestra of floppy drives, hard drives, and stepper motors is accompanied by a rare human appearance in this computer-controlled cover of The Buggles’ MTV-launcher, Video Killed the Radio Star.

In a way, all 3D printers are partially analog, as motors move them along their X, Y and Z axes. But artist Daniel DeBruin’s unique creation works without motors or electricity to layer primitive pottery using weights and gravity to drive its mechanism.

The guys from the Hydraulic Press Channel took a momentary break from crushing stuff with their press, and dropped by Lillbacka Powerco to play with their Finn-Power crimping machine, which is capable of crushing small objects from all sides with 320 tons of force.

Rocket scientist Mark Rober and his pal spent about 3 years perfecting their invention. This motorized dartboard is designed to track a dart being thrown at it, and ensures a bulls-eye assuming you’re somewhere within its board. It also can make you miss every time.

One of the stranger cooking machines we’ve seen – this thing takes in grain, salt, and water, then applies heat and pressure to make rice crackers. The resulting explosion causes them to fly out of its mouth like jet-powered frisbees. Here’s a similar machine.

Mechanical object designer and inventor Neil Mendoza created this machine, which uses a variety of mechanisms which make music using rocks. Some are fired at aluminum keys, others smack into marble, and yet others are slapped with leather to produce notes and rhythms.

Way more than an ordinary player piano, this incredible contraption is called the Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina. It can play a set of three violins using a special rotating circular bow, and dozens of mechanical “fingers” which press on the strings. More here and here.

LEGO builder Kristal – the “K” of JK Brickworks created this amazing kinetic sculpture, designed to mimic the wing movements of a fruit bat. Its wings flap up and down, sweep forward, and expand and contract. Jason Allemann walks us through how it works.

(PG-13 Language) Claw machines are the worst. They look like they’ll be so much fun until they eat all of your money as you try to win a stupid stuffed animal worth a dollar. Simone Giertz modded a machine to grab a prize every time.