Awesome Making

Serial maker The Q used over 530 square feet of cardboard and more than 100 hot glue sticks to build this 1/3rd scale model of a Formula 1 race car. After he finished building the structure, he went on to give the car a proper racing livery.

BrainfooTV shows us how to make nifty little rockets using ordinary household items like aluminum foil and strike-anywhere matches. They fire as far as 60 feet, and are surprisingly stable and accurate. The tailfins aren’t required, but they do make them look cooler.

While we prefer the aroma of a fresh cut Christmas tree, sometimes it’s nice to not have to deal with all of those needles on the floor. The Science Channel and Insider take us inside a factory that makes oversize fake Xmas trees to show us how they come together.

Jackman Works walks us through the complex process of making wooden coasters with a cool diamond pattern. He starts out with sticks of old pallet wood, stacks and laminates them with glue, cuts them on the diagonal, then slices, CNC carves circles, and finishes each one.

Like larger mosaics, micromosaics are images made up of numerous small colored pieces. But these are made using tweezers to lay in tiny pieces of glass. They look like paintings from any distance. The Victoria and Albert Museum shares footage of the painstaking process.

How to Make Everything decided to how many U.S. one cent coins it would take to make a copper sword. He first had to separate older and newer pennies to get the ones that are mostly copper, then set about the task. We’d love to see the blade patina over time.

Crafter Luke Reed self-admittedly isn’t a wood lathe expert, but we’re still impressed with the results of his first ever lathe project – taking a stack old skateboard decks, laminating them together, then shaping them into a wooden beer bottle.

This classic How It’s Made takes us inside the Dubble Bubble factory, where they make mass quantities of chewy, fruity gum meant for blowing bubbles. And if you ever wondered if it was okay to swallow your gum, the “made of plastics and rubbers” bit might dissuade you.

Slivki Show demonstrates how you can use a couple of cheap computer fans, a plastic tray, and some water to turn a brick into a desktop air conditioner. The porous nature of the brick, and the cutouts in the one used here, turn it into a surprisingly efficient cooling device.

If you haven’t watched the pilot of The Shivering Truth, take a few moments to pop it open in another tab. Then come back and watch this equally engrossing behind the scenes reel that reminds us just how much work goes into producing original stop-motion animation.

Given the fact that this weapon uses an electric spark and exploding butane gas to fire a large spherical projectile, American Hacker is very quick to point out that you should NOT try this at home. We agree, but it sure is fun to hear the sound of this thing in action.

Among his many projects, maker M.N. Projects likes to take old bits of metal and transform them into shiny new objects. Here, he takes the sleeve from a large bearing, cuts out a section, flattens it, and sharpens it into a tomahawk.

Want a pool in your backyard? You could go with a cheap above-ground one, or a pricey cement pond, or you could do what the guys from Primitive Survival Tool did, and just construct one from scratch. And this one has a secret room in the middle that you can hide in.

Keith Williams of Oddball Gallery shows off a sculpture he created from birch plywood. He first cut and assembled 180 triangular pieces into a geodesic orb, then sanded it to smooth the edges and reveal its grain. The sander time-lapse is so awesome. Here’s its little brother.

While you can certainly just go buy a Hot Wheels set, Mini Gear thinks its more fun to build your own track from scratch. He proves yet again that with cardboard, popsicle sticks, hot glue, and rubber bands, you can make just about anything with enough time and effort.

Cut from a flat plate of steel, Miller Knives‘ deadly jagged dagger isn’t exactly the most traditional form of metalsmithing we’ve seen, but the resulting weapon is too awesome not to share, and we’re guessing it would be nearly impossible to pull of using a forging process.

Metalsmith Shurap walks us through the process of laminating layers of stainless steel screen into a sweet damascus knife, layering the steel and pressing it repeatedly to create its swirled patterns, then anodizing it to bring out the blue tones.

Modustrial Maker teamed up with fellow builder Jonny Builds to transform a huge honkin’ wooden timber beam and sheets of steel into a sculptural ambient floor lamp, loaded up with LED strips that display patterns in reaction to music. We want one of these in our office.

When you visit casinos, it’s pretty easy to take all the grandeur for granted, but a lot of craftsmanship goes into everything you see on the gaming floor, such as the precisely balanced roulette wheels made by SET-Production shown in this brief factory video.

YouTuber Jisaku kōbō recently showed us how to upgrade cheap speakers with custom wood enclosures. He’s back to show how a pair of glass fish bowls can work with off-the-shelf speaker drivers. Every time he drilled into the glass, we cringed a little.

Evan Snider walks us through the process of crafting a completely handmade chainmail shirt, painstakingly assembled from thousands of copper rings, individually opened, then linked over the course of 66 hours. The finished shirt weighs in at about 25 pounds.

To celebrate the Halloween season, maker and tinkerer William Osman and his pals decided to see if they could transform a pumpkin into a working hovercraft. They used a vacuum cleaner as its primary source of flotation, and a couple of small drone motors to steer it.

We recently saw how a table saw could be pushed outside of its comfort zone by using one to create wood spindles. Now, woodworker French River Springs shows us how he was able to make a turned wood bowl using a table saw, a drill, and a custom jig. The fun starts at 8:21.