Awesome Making

A look inside the Duck Brand duct tape factory, where they transform rubber, gauze, and plastic into the super sticky, super strong material that’s a staple of every workshop. We wonder how quickly the Mythbusters could have built their duct tape canoe with that giant roll.

Metalsmith Dmitry Shevchenko (aka “Shurap“) continues to crank out knives using unconventional materials. After showing us how to make damascus steel from screws, washers, and cable, he’s back to craft the patterned metal from a car’s timing chain.

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.