THE BEST The Q

While it’s possible to build a hubless bicycle, it’s a mechanically complex feat. Builder The Q came up with a different approach that does away with spokes, replacing them with thick polyacrylate sheets. We’re not sure how durable they are, or how they affect ride quality, but it’s a really cool look.

The Q shows off a goopy compound they made from wood glue, nail varnish, and match sulfur that lets homemade matches burn even when fully submerged in water. This is definitely one you shouldn’t try at home, given the risks of both fire and the unknown consequences of breathing the vapors the chemicals produce.

Normally, bowling balls are made from a mix of chemicals. But The Q shows us how it’s possible to make one by cutting out 60 identical plywood triangles, gluing them into a sphere, filling it with foam and a weight, then sanding the structure smoothly. We’d like to play with that low-poly bowling ball before he sanded it.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, television cabinets made out of wood were the norm, but modern flat-screen displays are pretty much all encased in plastic. The Q wanted a PC monitor to match his wooden mouse and wooden keyboard, so he built a new case for his display, complete with PHILIPS logo and burnt wood control lettering.

The Q was looking for a way to power his plug-in gadgets while away from home. While he could have just bought a ready-made power pack, he decided to build his own, wiring together dozens of 18650 batteries, then connecting an inverter to convert the DC power into AC.

Maker of things The Q has been on a bit of a roll lately, producing all kinds of nifty things for us to enjoy. Watch as he takes a copper coin, flattens it out, and turns the sheet metal into a working “paper” airplane. While it isn’t one of his more complex builds, it’s still a cool build.

Over the years, The Q has made some unique vehicles, from a walking bicycle to a cardboard F1 car. This time out, he set out to build one of those hamster wheel-inspired monowheels, primarily out of wood. We assume the long beams sticking in front of the pedal-powered wheel help act as a counterbalance.

After building himself an F1 car out of soda cans, builder The Q decided to make himself another cool, but highly-impractical vehicle. This time, he spent over 200 hours building a bicycle entirely out of wood and glue – including the frame, wheels, chain, seat and pedals.

After building himself a rustic keyboard from wood, builder of things The Q decided to make a matching mouse. He started out with a hunk of nice hardwood, copied the shape of a plastic mouse onto it, then got to work cutting it down, sculpting its form, then carving out its center to make room for its mechanism.

Rock’em Sock’em Robots have been entertaining kids since 1964. If you enjoy knocking your friend’s block off, along with the sense of achievement that comes with DIY, The Q is here to show you how to build your own using cardboard, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, bottle caps, and paper clips.

Maker The Q shows off one of his more unusual constructions – a mouse-sized wooden staircase that appears to be built into a wall. We’re not sure where the secret door leads to, but we want him to build the rest of the house to go with it now.

Maker The Q adds to his collection of homebrew toy weapons with a toy that rapid-fires pellets using compressed air stored in a backpack made from an array of plastic soda bottles. We’re wondering how much further you could scale this up with more bottles.

The Q decided that ordinary matches weren’t big enough for him, so he went ahead and made five giant-sized matches out of wood, rope, and a homemade mix of incendiary chemicals like the ones on a real match head. To complete the set, he built a wooden matchbox with a sandpaper striker on its side.

The Q takes a gamble with this build – a fully-functional slot machine built from cardboard, popsicle sticks, and hot glue. We love the detail he included on the reels to make it look like the real deal. Stick around for a few other fun DIY builds in this compilation video.

Taking obvious inspiration from artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests and CARV’s earlier efforts, maker The Q fabricated himself a crazy bicycle which has no rear wheel, and instead can walk across the ground. This design appears much smoother than the one we previously saw, but by no means the fastest way to ride a bicycle.

You can pick up a cheap paper shredder for about 20 bucks, but what fun is that when you can build your own? The Q shows off a homebrew shredder that does the trick using sharpened metal discs. It’s missing the safety mechanisms that production shredders offer, so DIY at your own risk.

Those pin art boards that you can press your face or other body parts into are cheap and easy to come by. But The Q decided he wanted a much bigger one, so he set about the arduous task of drilling 4,758 tiny holes into plywood, then poking a skewer through each one.

Maker The Q built this awesome larger-than-life, fully-articulated LEGO minifig costume using cardboard and hot glue. With more than three weeks left until Halloween, you should have plenty of time to try and replicate the design yourself. Are you up to the challenge?

The Q built one of the most insane custom bicycles we’ve ever seen. He replaced the standard wheels of his wide-tire bike with special rims that wear six shoes each instead of tires. It doesn’t look like the smoothest ride ever, but the shoe rubber does provide decent traction.

Like James Bond’s Q, YouTube’s The Q has an obsession with building amazing things. Though in the case of the latter, his builds have serious budget constraints. Watch as he turns some PVC pipe and fabric into a set of articulated wings that Bruce Wayne might have stored in the Batcave.

The Q has built some pretty nifty mechanical contraptions from cardboard, and here’s another. Watch as he turns a mix of cardbaord, paper, rubber bands, springs, and popsicle sticks into a working model of a 7-segment numeric display, like you might find on alarm clock.

The Q usually makes things that involve hot glue to hold them together. But this time, he created a couple of really cool structures by patiently stacking lots of coins. Stick around long enough, and you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing them tumble.

For his latest video, The Q played with fire. He took the chemicals used to make matchstick heads and reconstituted them to make oversized versions. Then he erected gradually larger and larger sizes to set off a visually-impressive chain reaction. Things heat up around the 3:27 mark.

While they’re pretty cheap and easy to come by these days, maker of stuff The Q decided to see if he could build himself a stabilizing rig for a camera for the heck of it. His oversized gimbal uses PVC pipe for its structure, and the platter from a hard drive as its gyro wheel.

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.

DIY channel The Q shows us how to make a kayak using only three materials: sticks, shrinkwrap and a ton of transparent tape. The question of course is how and why you’d carry the latter two in the wild. But the end result is surprisingly sturdy.