Awesome Making

Primitive Technology makes a sling from bark fiber and then learns how to shoot with it. It’s one of the simplest ranged weapons you can make, but it’s very hard to master and is noisy too. For April Fools’ he should show us how he shoots and edits videos.

How to Make Everything made a simple Thanksgiving dinner, though not 100% from scratch. Still, the process involved planting herbs and mushrooms, harvesting beets and cranberries and yes, shooting a wild turkey. Watch every step here.

Watch as this skilled Japanese knife sharpener takes a rusty old kitchen knife and makes it good as new, with a little cleaning compound, some water, sharpening stones, and lots of good old elbow grease.

After making a sandwich and a suit from scratch, How to Make Everything host Andy George shows us how to create a soda fountain favorite from raw ingredients. It only cost him $900 and took days of work, but at least he can call it “handcrafted.” Watch every step here.

While we were touring the mountains in the new 2016 Camaro SS (yeah, hard life, we know), we dropped by the Bozeman, Montana factory where Gibson Acoustic has been crafting guitars for the last 30 years. Incredibly, almost every step of the process is still done by hand.

Wired talks to Shawn Thorsson, whose life changed course after he saw a trailer for the first Iron Man movie. After making a replica of Tony Stark’s suit, Shawn never looked back and has been making amazing costumes and prop replicas ever since.

More than 50 years after its initial creation, Jaguar started building a handful of new E-Type sports cars with aluminum bodies. Watch the British automaker once again handcraft this beautiful car in this 5-minute video from inside Jaguar’s Coventry factory.

A master glass blower in Italy shows how to take a blob of molten glass and transform it into a detailed sculpture in seconds, massaging the searing hot material into a prancing horse with tongs and scissors. Skip to 1:00.

Footage of a relatively simple, yet ingenious 4-axis industrial milling machine that can cut, engrave and shape up multiple objects simultaneously. These sort of machines are most often used to make decorative woodwork, furniture legs, or small sculptures.

Make’s Darbin Orvar shows how to craft a baseball bat from three pieces of walnut and rough-sawn maple wood that she cuts, trims, smooths, laminates, then hand-tools and finishes on her lathe. It’s a tremendous amount of work, but an impressive result.

Jockeying for the title of “Coolest Dad of the Year,” builder Izzy Swan took his drill-powered walking machine and turned it into a 10 foot-tall T.Rex for his son. Its legs, mouth, and tail move. We think it should be named “Mechasaurus Rex,” but it’s simply known as “Bob.”

(PG-13) An episode in a single handyman’s life, told through his hands and the things they touch. In filmmaking, a cut-in is a close up shot of something in the main scene. A cutaway is a model with its exterior removed, exposing what’s inside. A vivid short by Kazik Radwanski.

Primitive Technology shows us how he created a complete, heated shelter using nothing more than rudimentary handmade tools, trees, strips of cane and mud. He even made his own roof tiles from clay, using a kiln he made with similar techniques. The total build took him 102 days.

A fascinating sequence from the Discovery show How It’s Made, in which used old tires are shredded and turned into tiny particles which can then be melted down and turned into new rubber mats, in a great examples of recycling what would have once just sat in a landfill.

“When we let things convey unto us, that is true artistic expression. But when we try to convey ourselves onto things, that is delusion.” Man at Arms Reforged made a katana from scratch using traditional Japanese tools and techniques.

The Met takes us inside the painstaking, 10-month process of restoring a massive oil painting from 1660, first removing old varnish, then repairing its structure and canvas, restretching the canvas, touching up paint, and revarnishing it.