Awesome Machines

Disposable plastic cups aren’t exactly the best thing for the environment. Still, it’s interesting to see how they’re made. This factory machine takes rolls of plastic and uses a vacuum and heat to thermoform thousands of cups an hour. After it spits out cups, spinning brushes sort them into rows for stacking and packaging.

If you’ve ever curbed the rims on your car, you know how awful it can look. But with the proper equipment and expertise, it’s possible to repair damaged rims. Wheel Restore USA shows how their diamond cut wheel lathe can make even heavily damaged wheels look as good as new by removing a thin layer of metal. They also have a wheel-painting robot.

Inventor Colin Furze has created some wild and wondrous things over the years, and his Rhino tank build looks awesome. But as you’ll see in the video for the hemispherical-wheeled tank, good looks don’t necessarily mean capability, and beauty is only skin deep.

It’s amazing what you can do with a precise laser cutter. This video from Tranyond shows how a powerful fiber laser can cut such fine lines that it can turn a flat sheet of aluminum into a series of nested spheres. The trick is that each cut leaves a tiny bit of metal on its edges to keep them connected when it’s opened up.

This compact CNC machine from Samurai Machine Tools changes tools in as little as 2.3 seconds with its pair of rotating tool carousels and quick-change heads. Its spinning head remains stationary while its pedestal moves the part it’s milling. Watch it in action machining a piece of aluminum. Prices for the machine start at £4990, or about $6345 USD.

Ryder Calm Down loves to make things. Inspired by how dot-matrix printers lay down ink, he built an oversized print head that attaches to the back of his pickup truck and sprays out water droplets at the right time to create letters and numbers. The system uses a Raspberry Pi to control relays and solenoids that open and close valves.

We’ve featured some really interesting mechanisms created with LEGO Technic parts. But the ones we’ve seen before are usually shown as separate, disconnected systems. Brick Machines built more than 40 different kinds of mechanisms and combined them into a single, compact machine.

It’s easy to make popcorn in your microwave these days, but there’s something about how popcorn emerges from a classic popcorn maker that makes it more festive. Dr. Restoration got their hands on a 1950s popper called a Corn Pop-O-Mat, stripped off years of rust and grease, and brought the electric appliance back to like-new condition.

After realizing how much time he spends on his phone, JBV Creative was inspired to build an electro-mechanical artwork as a commentary on the distracted nature of today’s gadget-dependent society. The finished piece features a group of phone-holding figures that wobble along on a conveyor belt, smash into a wall, fall down, and do it all over again.

RCLifeOn built a unique drawing machine that creates geometric illustrations on an acrylic sheet using a computer-controlled fluorescent marker. Bright LED lights help the images glow brilliantly. For now, images must be manually erased between drawings, but he plans to add an eraser mechanism.

Brick Technology built this unique LEGO clock with dials that can display much more than hours, minutes, and seconds. It also keeps track of days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, mega-annum, and galactic years. Unfortunately, we’ll never know if it works beyond the 21st century.

Builder Handy Geng was worried about leaving his uncle alone to watch his workshop, so he did what any mad inventor would and built a mech to help guard the premises. It has caterpillar tracks like a tank, punching metal fists, and water guns which really should have been flamethrowers. English subtitles available.

Sit back and enjoy this 14-minute video from a bread factory in Korea, where ingredients are combined, then kneaded into dough and baked in industrial ovens. Then the freshly-baked loaves of white and chestnut bread glide along an assembly line, tumble out of their pans and head to the cooling racks before slicing.

An electric hot wire cutter is the easiest way to get smooth cuts from styrofoam. LEGO mechanical expert Akiyuki Brick Channel took a basic hot wire cutter and mounted it in a machine that can spin a block of foam and move the wire to cut the kind of objects you might create on a lathe. It can also cut shapes from flat sheets of foam.

Blower fans use a spinning metal cage to move large amounts of air. See how a factory makes these fans in this video from All Process of World. At the core of the operation is a machine that accepts a pair of rings and curved metal blades, then bends the ends to hold them in place. The outer housing is assembled by hand using a rivet gun and power screwdriver.

Artist Uri Tuchman is an expert at building unique devices with a Steampunk aesthetic. This time, he built a pair of mechanical wooden hands that appear to type on an imaginary keyboard. It’s part of a larger installation headed to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Ironically, Uri broke his hand after he completed the project.

In LEGO terminology, “GBC” stands for Great Ball Contraption, and Berthil van Beek is an expert at building these complex LEGO machines which connect to other GBC modules. His latest build is an enormous Ferris wheel that picks up tiny basketballs and soccer balls, takes them on a trip, and delivers them to the next station’s inbox.

With the advent of computers, typewriters became pretty much obsolete. But it’s still amazing to see the incredible engineering that went into this once ubiquitous office equipment. Jake from Animagraffs takes us deep into the inner workings of a mechanical typewriter using a detailed 3D model of an early 20th-century Underwood.

Datcrazy dusted off the designs from a Victorian-era pencil sharpener to create a version using modern techniques. Constructed from precision-engineered metal and wood, this 6.6-pound, hand-cranked contraption is the ultimate conversation piece for your desk. It’s being made in batches of just 100 units.

The Kokoni Sota aims to improve upon three shortcomings of 3D printers: speed, noise, and color. Its makers claim it can output at up to 600mm/s at a whisper-quiet 30dB and can incorporate up to seven materials with the optional external filament tower. It’s also the first FDM printer we’ve seen that works inverted.

Metal objects like the Metmo Cube are fascinating because they feature parts that are so precisely cut that you can’t see where one piece begins and the other one ends. Science educator Steve Mould explains wire EDM machining, which enables the creation of such incredibly tight-fitting objects.

GazR’s Extreme Brick Machines modified a LEGO treadmill they built and turned it into an extreme obstacle course for a remote-controlled tank. The treadmill is powered by four Powered Up L motors and includes a variety of hills, rollers, ramps, speed bumps, a turntable, and a spinning gate for the tank to navigate.

Colin Furze was asked by the makers of Warframe to build a machine that could let him jump and fly like the characters in the game. So he got to work doing what any mad inventor would and built a massive gimbal that uses hydraulics and a counterweight to let him bounce around like he’s in a low-gravity environment.