Awesome Machines

It’s easy enough to build a simple sorter that organizes coins based on size, but Daniele Tartaglia went the extra mile. The maker created an electromechanical coin sorting machine that not only separates and stacks coins based on denominations but counts and totals them as they drop through a curvy maze.

Is your finger flick underpowered? Worry no longer! Thanks to The Q, there’s now a solution for weak finger flickers. The maker designed and fabricated a metal cover that gives his middle finger an extra boost of power thanks to a spring-loaded mechanism. This must be killer for paper football games.

As impressive as large-scale milling machines can be, compact machines that can create intricate parts are equally fascinating to us. In this clip, Bantam Tools shows off their Desktop PCB Milling Machine as it carves a miniature topographic map of Washington’s Mount Rainier out of a cube of aluminum.

This modular tabletop machine gives makers the tools they need to drill, grind, saw, turn, mill, and lathe objects. Its tools work with wood, metal, and engineering plastics and is ideal for DIYers. The base kit includes sawing, grinding, and drilling modules, while milling, lathing, and wood-turning are add-ons.

What’s better than a delicious cupcake? A machine that can crank out cupcakes for you on-demand, that’s what. Skeyntific shows off a robotic factory line he built that first pours dough for each cupcake, moves it into a modified microwave for cooking, then applies toppings using motorized caulking guns.

The Brick Wall loves to build LEGO Technic machines and factories. This time out, he created an incredibly complicated system that cuts, mills, and assembles a log cabin – only the logs are cucumbers. We want to see it make hot dog houses with mortar made from mustard.

Mathematician Yosuke Ikeda created this tricky machine which uses a mirror to make it appear that there is one more marble on its turntable than there really is. Except when the mirror is moved out of the way, another marble really is there.

Mechanical engineer Kiyoshi Adachi created this wonderful work of kinetic wall art which features a tiny metal man who turns a crank, setting into motion a ballet of spinning gears and dancing rods. Those elliptical gears are especially cool.

A while back, we shared some works by artist James Nolan Gandy, who uses custom-built machines to create oscillating line drawings on a rotating canvas. He continues to hone his technique, and his more recent drawings are even more impressive. We especially love this rainbow-colored piece.

The Enigma Machine was a cipher device used by Germany during WWII to encrypt and decrypt top-secret communications. Animator and educator Jared Owen provides a detailed look at its ingenious design and how it scrambled and unscrambled letters. Given its complexity, we’re amazed that it was cracked.

We’ve taken you inside of a factory that makes plastic bottles, now see how more environmentally-friendly glass bottles are born. New Age Media posted this video of a high-speed production line that takes molten blobs of glass, blows them into molds, then passes them through a series of conveyors as they cool.

While it’s not as powerful as a hydraulic press or an industrial shredder, this LEGO Technic mashing machine from GazR’s Extreme Brick Machines is still fun to watch. It uses a pair of rapidly-moving, angled belts to push objects towards a center bar that smashes things apart.

We’ve seen plenty of Rube Goldberg machines, but this one holds the Guinness World Record for the largest one to date. Chevrolet Menlo, Wang Xiqi, and Guan Jian built the complicated contraption, which takes 427 steps to turn a light on. We’re not sure if it’s physically the largest, but it’s the most complicated we’ve seen.

Your typical nutcracker does a pretty good job at pulverizing walnut shells. But Shane from Stuff Made Here wanted something that could crack a steel nut, so he put his engineering chops to good use and built this insanely powerful nutcracker that uses gunpowder to chomp down with more force than Jaws in Moonraker.

Inspired by Smarter Every Day’s powerful home run machine, the guys from How Ridiculous wanted to try and beat Destin’s 717-foot batting record. So they teamed up with aeronautical engineering firm Innovaero to a create a batting machine that imitates a helicopter’s rotor blades. This thing is terrifying as it spins up.

LEGO Technic machine expert The Brick Wall created an amazing working sawmill that turns long logs into individual pieces of firewood. The wood is delivered on the back of a LEGO truck, then the factory cuts the wood into smaller logs, then splits them into quarters, ready for lighting.

We’ve seen the strange but fascinating way that rubber gloves are made. Now watch a less efficient but equally satisfying method that involves pouring streams of molten rubber over spinning hand molds until they’re evenly coated. It also looks like a great way to take down a villain in an action movie.

Illustrating just how interdependent the world has become, artist Neil Mendoza built The Fragility of Complexity, a motorized, kinetic art installation composed of a row of hammers that rotate perilously close to a series of moving light bulbs. Neil says only a single light bulb was broken during its construction.

These gigantic circular saws riding on rails and kicking up dust look like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. In fact, these massive cutting tools are used today to cut blocks of stone in a quarry in China. Here’s a closer look at one of the saws in action.

Inspired by the machines of Wintergatan, Daniel de Bruin, and Matthias Wandel, fellow maker Ivan Miranda created his own musical marble machine. He designed and built it from scratch using 3D printed parts, a resin drum, and an aluminum frame. The ball bearings make notes by falling onto a MIDI controller keypad.

With up to 150 tons of force, a hydraulic press should have no trouble driving a nail into a piece of wood. But what happens when you up the challenge and add dozens of nails beneath its powerful crushing head? Watch and find out just how many nails a single press can drive at the same time. Nailing Level 1000 here.

It’s taken three years, but the guys at Hacksmith Industries have finally completed their working replica of the Power Loader from Aliens. In this final build video, they tidy up the cabling and put on finishing touches before taking it for an all-too-brief spin. We can’t wait to see them take down a xenomorph with this thing.

For a motor to work, it needs tightly-wound copper or aluminum coils to generate a magnetic field when current is applied. This fascinating video from NIDE shows how their machines do the work automatically, first loading an armature, then rapidly winding copper wire around its fins.