Awesome Making

John Heisz previously showed us how to take an old saw blade and turn it into a folding knife. Now he applies his craftsmanship to transforming a rusty circular saw blade into an elegant, traditional woodworking tool.

Despite having limited reference materials to work from, Baltimore Knife and Sword’s talented swordsmiths, machinists, and armourers managed to build an impressive replica of Voltron’s iconic blade, complete with propane jets that shoot fire.

Made by Destruction shows how the copper wiring in old copy machines can be reclaimed to produce shiny new products like brass musical instruments. Along the way, we get to see these defunct office machines satisfyingly ripped to pieces by an industrial shredder.

Hagerty shares this time-lapse of an old Ford Flathead V8 engine being stripped down to its block, then painstakingly rebuilt to like-new by Thirlby Automotive with the help of Edelbrock. It’s amazing how good something this old can look with enough time and effort.

Artist Kyle Toth demonstrates the painstaking process of transforming boards of bocote and ash wood into an intricate donut-shaped sculpture. The finished work contains 2,340 individual pieces of wood, and took Kyle about 90 hours to complete.

Primitive Technology made a yam and sweet potato garden. He said he got the sweet potatoes from “civilization”, but we’re okay with that. If you left us with nothing but sweet potatoes and cargo shorts we’d be dead by sunset.

Science Channel’s always enthralling How It’s Made shares a look inside a candy factory that makes those little colorful sprinkles (aka “jimmies”), and the process that it takes to turn sugar, shortening, and food coloring into the decorative treat.

Carpenter Matthias Wandel demonstrates the complicated process of creating links in a wooden chain from a single block of maple hardwood without using any glue. To add to the challenge, he did it almost entirely with power tools rather than hand carving.

Sure, you could go to the store and buy a skillet for about 10 bucks, but you won’t get the satisfaction that Tito4re got when he made his own from scratch, using a sand mold and some molten aluminum. Though he did need another skillet to make the mold too.

A compact vacuum former that gets its suction from a vacuum cleaner. Use the FormBox and thermoplastic sheets to make small molds, prototypes and more. It has a 7.9 cu.in. build area and comes with 30 thermoplastic sheets.

“It’s all fairly simple.” Yeah right. Woodworker Frank Howarth celebrates Star Wars Day in the best way possible – by sharing video of his painstakingly handcrafted wooden Death Star. It’s simply astounding that you can make something like this from flat pieces of wood.

It’s the rainy season in Savage Land Queensland, so Primitive Technology thought that it’s time for his alter ego to make some clothes. He spent a few days making yarn out of fiber and about a day to weave it into a rough fabric using his handmade loom.

It might look like an ordinary bottle of milk, but other than the label and the lid, this thing is entirely made from candy. DaveHax walks us through the relatively simple process of using drink bottles to mold chocolate into an edible container filled with even more candy treats.

Modelmaker Luke Towan walks us through the painstaking process of building a tiny tree for a model railroad. It requires time and patience, but the end result is quite realistic, and the video is as soothing as watching Bob Ross paint. His teensy hay bales are nuts too.

Man at Arms: Reforged made a replica of the highly coveted sword from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It may not look as imposing or complex as the other weapons they forged, but it took a lot of time and finesse to create the details on both the blade and the guard.

One of the more unusual bits from the How It’s Made series takes us to a creepy factory filled with hand-shaped ceramic molds that wind their way through a lengthy assembly line, and then dipped in rubber and heated in an oven. Seriously, did Tim Burton create this place?