Awesome Machines

(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.

What you’re looking at is an oddly satisfying contraption in which a roll of tape meanders its way through a maze with extraordinary skill. It’s from a Japanese kids show which featured one of these wonderful machines every week. Find more on KeN KeN’s channel.

LEGO builder Berthil van Beek created this wonderfully soothing contraption which sees an array of tiny sportsballs surfing across a wave made from 1,150 dancing LEGO bricks in 38 different colors. We want one for our office – in a soundproof chamber.

It might be officially called a Wacker Neuson Hydrostatic Trowel, but these ride-on machines are like a zamboni for concrete, smoothing and finishing the building material, thanks to water jets and fan blades which spin just above the surface. (Thanks Kathy!)

A completely hypnotic video of a computer-controlled metal lathe as it gradually transforms an ordinary metal rod into a twisty, wavy thing. We’re not sure what the finished piece is intended for – all we know is we’ll do whatever it tells us to.

Forget simulators. Located in Pottsboro, TX and Hastings, MN, Extreme Sandbox will teach you how to operate heavy equipment – a bulldozer, a wheel loader, an excavator, or a fire truck – and have fun with them through various challenges.

We’ve seen machines that could solve simple Rubik’s Cubes very quickly, but this impressive build is not only made entirely from LEGO Mindstorms, but can solve an insanely complex 9x9x9 cube. It takes it about 35 minutes, but we’d like to see you do better.

Brick builder Alexander Holroyd shows off yet another unconventional use for LEGO – creating kinetic sculptures. Beyond the Brick caught up with Alexander and his hypnotic mechanical toys at BrickCon 2016. More here and here.

For his latest one-day build, Adam Savage and his Tested pals cheated a bit, spending a couple of days cutting, welding, and assembling a complicated walking machine inspired by the work of Theo Jansen. And you thought assembling IKEA furniture was tricky.

While there’s no such thing as an actual perpetual motion machine (pesky physics!), this is still a cool demonstration how an off-balance mechanism can run for a relatively long period of time with minimal energy input.

The latest version of Evil Mad Scientist Labs‘ versatile pen plotter can write on most flat surfaces, using a writing instrument of your choice to create intricate, precise, and repeatable drawings and handwriting. It runs at up to 2x the speed of the old model.

Using a pair of record players, a stick of wood, a binder clip, a fine point pen, and some tape, you can make a machine that traces the movements of one turntable’s arm, to make abstract art on the other’s platter. You can make something even cooler with a little extra effort.

A demonstration of a tight tolerance object cut out of two pieces of steel using Wire EDM, a technology which uses an electrically-charged wire which can cut through objects with as tight as 2 microns of tolerance. View another example here.

We love seeing unusual machines work their magic to produce items we take for granted. Here’s a machine that takes spools of stiff wire and twists them into the interlocking rows of a chain-link fence, while another set of tools twists the loose ends together.

Students at Germany’s Jade Hochschule created this amazing machine which uses Mindstorms mechanisms along with a class 4 laser to cut, score, and fold a tiny paper box – the one and only product of the world’s smallest factory. Naturally, the place is staffed by Minifigs.

At one point or another, we’ve all encountered an off-balance washing machine that starts making horrible sounds. This guy seized the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade, using the incessant banging noise as the backing track for Louisiana Saturday Night.

After being transfixed by their video of springs being made, we decided to check out some of the other videos on music label INDUSTRIAL JP’s YouTube channel, and each and every one of them is equally as fascinating.

While we enjoy hand-carving pumpkins for Halloween, we’d be cool letting this 60,000 psi industrial waterjet cutter perform the task for us. The folks at the Waterjet Channel show how their cutter can crank out a jack-o-lantern in 30 seconds flat.

Normally, when you need to move around the trailers from an 18-wheeler, you need a big rig to pull them. But with Verhagen Leiden’s V-move Elektrotrekker XXL, an individual can tow around an entire trailer much in the same way they’d pull a little red wagon.

Hypnotic footage of an Intralox conveyor system, which uses a series of active roller belts to move individual products into perfect formation for loading onto pallets. The objects seem to move into position as if by magic. This demo is equally enthralling.

Jason Allemann of JK Brickworks shows off a relatively simple, yet awesome LEGO machine which uses a motor and hinged arms to move a pen in repeated geometric patterns, resulting in Spirograph-like drawings. Jason provides full instructions for building your own here.

We’ve seen lots of LEGO vending machines, but never one that can dispense liquids. ElectryDragonite used a pair of Mindstorms NXT servo motors to create a hydraulic pump that to send soda through the machine and into a glass once the customer pays up.

This marvel of modern engineering at China’s Three Gorges Dam is capable of lifting 6.7 million pounds of boats, water, and people to a height of over 34 stories. It takes 40 minutes to get to the top, shaving more than 2 hours off of the previous route over the dam.