Awesome Making

Charged with moving the pistons in and out, a crankshaft is like the beating heart of an engine. While crankshafts need to be finished by machining, they start by forging and stamping steel, then twisting the molten metal to form the journals and counterweights that comprise this critical car part.

In the past, Burls Art has shown off his guitar-building abilities by making instruments out of jawbreakers, Himalayan salt, coffee beans, and more. This time, he’s changed things up by building an electric bass guitar, using about 2,000 LEGO bricks to form its body. We love the colorful pattern he came up with.

Last Leg Woodworks shows us how they made this cool piece of modern wall art using Inventables’ X-Carve Pro CNC machine and their free Easel software. The piece was carved out of 77 slices of baltic birch plywood, then hand-assembled using mortise and tenon joints.

Wood seems like a terrible material to make a cushion out of, given its hardness. But Kurahito Craft shows how – with a little ingenuity – it’s feasible to build a pliable (and possibly comfortable) wooden seat using a wooden spring-making technique.

The YouTube channel for Mr Custom Crafts is loaded with unique works of art created from metal. In this video, they show how they turned a metal rod and nails into the immensely creepy and crawly scolopendra gigantea, aka the largest centipede in the world. If you enjoyed watching that, check out the scorpion they made.

If there’s one thing city dwellers can relate to, it’s that living space is at a premium. So if it’s possible to replace multiple pieces of furniture with a single item, it’s worth doing. Get Hands Dirty shows off a versatile coffee table that they built that also serves as a platform for a murphy bed and a pop-up desk.

One of the main benefits of a pocket knife is that it fits in your pocket. That didn’t stop The Q from making a folding knife big enough for Paul Bunyon. The enormous knife measures more than 47″ long when opened and has a hefty steel blade and a rather terrifying automatic mechanism.

We’ve always been wowed by the craft of Kumiko. Inspired by the elegant Japanese latticework, Make With Miles created a unique electric guitar with a body that incorporates the technique. After cutting and assembling the wood, he filled the openings with tinted epoxy for contrast. He also made a matching amp.

A store-bought pizza cutter is usually made from stainless steel. The guys from Waterjet Channel decided to make one from Damascus steel and titanium instead, so they teamed up with Jesse and Jeff from Vegas Forge to create this impressive wheel for slicing with style. Though we’d hate to get cheese all over it.

After building three electric guitar bodies out of colored pencils, Burls Art has stepped up his game by making one with more than 2000 individual pencils, nearly doubling his last effort, and incorporating the neck into the same mold as the body. Watching that crystal clear epoxy poured over the pencils is just so satisfying.

Make Anything’s Tippi Tree is a party game that challenges players to stack and interlock blocks but in a more organic way than Jenga. Maker Devin Montes has now built a giant version of the game out of wood. If you want to play some Tippi Tree for yourself, you can purchase the design for 3D printing from MyMiniFactory.

Electric scooters usually have tiny wheels, which makes them agile but not exactly grippy. The Q’s oversize scooter has a bit more contact patch thanks to its Formula One wheels, wrapped in slick Pirelli P-Zero tires. It’s powered by a 25kw brushless electric motor and has a battery pack under its riding deck.

Unexpected is an expert at building things out of popsicle sticks and glue. Unlike other constructions that still look like sticks, he manages to create objects that look more like carvings from a block of wood. Here, he show off a popsicle Ducati 899 Panigale, which is one of four wooden motorcycles he built.

Go inside of Italy’s Beta Utensili factory, where they take pieces of raw steel, heat them, hot roll, and machine hammer them into their rough shapes, before cutting them out, sand blasting, grinding, tumbling, and refining their openings before hardening and plating each piece into a finished combination wrench.

A normal 6-sided die weighs about 0.2 oz. This 4″ stainless steel die by Justin Voss is a bit heftier. This video shows how he used a CNC plasma cutter to slice up the steel, then cleaned up the edges with a grinder and welded the pieces together. If you know how to weld, you can pick up a kit of pre-cut parts on Justin’s website.

Most kitchen timers are pretty boring. But maker VALiMA wanted something unique and modern, so they set out to create a high-tech timer that looks more like a weapon from a science fiction movie than something you’d have lying around your kitchen utility drawer. We love the clicky sounds it makes as it spins.