Awesome Making

Some of our favorite candy treats are Twizzlers strawberry and cherry twists. In this excerpt from an episode of Unwrapped, we go inside Hershey’s Twizzlers factory, where machines spurt out seemingly endless red ropes and give them their trademark twisted shape.

An in-depth look inside Rapido Trains Inc.’s production facility in China, where workers painstakingly assemble scale model train engines and rail cars. Each model train body is individually molded, masked, painted, detailed, and assembled by hand.

While most knives are made from steel, they can certainly be made from other materials. Here, blademaker Kiwami Japan shows us how to transform a sheet of super-hard lignum vitae wood into a razor-sharp kitchen utensil, capable of slicing veggies just like a metal blade.

While there really is little difference between the way that macaroni was prepared back in 18th-century England and now, we were still completely drawn in by this video from Townsends about the joy of making and eating such a simple and delicious dish.

Inspired by The Boring Company’s flamethrower, maker Peter Sripol decided to build his own version – though this one is smaller – and much more dangerous than the one Elon Musk was peddling. We love how he calls it a “Temperature Enhancement Device.”

Frank Howarth knows a thing or two about making spheres, so we couldn’t help but be transfixed as we watched him turn an ordinary block of walnut wood into a beautifully-smooth replica of an 8-ball. The round clamp he built for holding it on the CNC table is ingenious.

Metalsmith shurap bunched together a number of self-tapping screws, then heated, and repeatedly hammered them down flat to create a damascus-style patterned blade. Like his steel washer and cable blades, the finished knife has a truly unique and beautiful texture.

We’ve always assumed that chocolate was meant to be eaten, and not used as a kitchen utensil. But after you watch this video from Kiwami Japan, you’ll see how chocolate can not only be moulded into the shape of a knife, but it can be sharpened enough to actually cut food.

Eirik Moe captured the traditional process still used today in a soap factory in Nablus. After combining the ingredients of their olive oil soaps, the mixture is poured onto the floor, dried, measured into individual blocks, embellished with a mallet, then hand-cut.

After creating a mix of chilled acetone and water that was both slushy and flammable, The King of Random tried to make fiery snowballs using a similar technique. After a few false starts, he succeeded with gasoline-soaked snowballs. Kids, don’t try this at home.

Voltera’s machine lets you print two layer circuit boards right on your desktop. Its plotter lays down layers of silver-based conductive ink, making circuit prototyping and experimentation crazy simple. it can even prep, heat, and reflow solder for surface-mounted components.

Maker Gustav Evertsson paid tribute to the 2018 Winter Olympics with a neat build. He created a series of motorized blades which he loaded up with steel wool and set ablaze. The resulting persistence of vision illusion reveals a fiery version of the iconic 5-ring Olympic logo.

A look at the Rudolf Grauer BK-1500 – a machine designed to crank out up to 1500 paper clips per minute in a variety of shapes by bending stiff strands of wire. The voiceover is in German, but that just makes the engineering seem even more serious and impressive.

Engineer BrunS takes his metalworking skills to the world of Fallout, meticuously crafting this bronze, duralumin, brass, ebonite, and luminofor model of the Red Rocket from the wasteland’s #1 diesel fusion filling stations. Available from his Etsy shop for about $500.

Laser engravers use powerful laser beams to burn designs into wood and other materials. But when Make Anything’s flatbed engraver broke, he decided to take its laser head and turn it into a handheld writing instrument. It’s not the safest thing on Earth, but it is cool.

After building himself an airplane, Peter Sripol decided to make himself something a little less ambitious, but just as fun – a tricked-out sled that can glide across the snow thanks to an airplane propeller on the back. It’s not exactly fast, but it lets him go sledding without a hill.

This wouldn’t be the first time we saw a machine gun that fires rubber bands, but this time out, we’ve got The Q showing us step-by-step how he built his from cardboard, wood, string, hot glue, and popsicle sticks. If you’d rather not DIY, you can buy a wood one here.

Adam Fieldson of WhipWorks makes beautiful bull whips by weaving nylon paracord. Here, he walks us through the painstaking process of making one of his whips – a gift he presented to Tested and Mythbusters star Adam Savage. You can purchase his work in his Etsy shop.

Grant “The King of Random” Thompson shows us how to build a cool looking light-up fountain that not only spins water around in an endless whirlpool, it has a bubbler that he rigged up with propane gas so the surface of the water lights on fire.

Not every knife has to have a single continuous edge, does it? Watch as blademaker Miller Knives cuts out and sculpts a truly unusual knife with a crazy staggered edge. It looks like something out of a video game or a comic book, and also like it would be really deadly.

Footage of a machine that quickly makes wooden beads, using a lathe, hole saw and a drill. A square stick of wood is spun on one axis, and is gradually moved into the saw which spits out a finished ball. Here’s a similar machine that’s equally satisfying.

A video chronicle of the extensive build process that goes into hand-making a custom Goodall Guitar. You’ll need to invest nearly 50 minutes of your time to watch the entire video, but for anyone who appreciates fine craftsmanship, it’ll be worth the effort.

Tony Fisher knows a thing or two about making Rubik’s Cubes. After all, he’s the guy behind the world’s largest working cube, and has also built all kinds of complex variants. Here, he shows off a fully-functional puzzle that he made using ice. Hopefully, he’ll work out a color version.