flexures

AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Primitive Technology shows building a cord drill from scratch and then upgrading it to a pump drill, using only primitive materials like a stone flywheel and cord.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Stuff Made Here builds a handwriting robot and sends its output to a handwriting expert to see whether it can pass as forgery. It walks through the engineering trials and errors along the way.

Mark Rober shows an automatic bullseye dartboard that tracks a thrown dart with motion capture and moves in real time so it always hits the center. He spent over three years on the project.

AvE tears down a high-end KitchenAid stand mixer, looking at its castings, large DC motor and gear train. He also picks apart some design trade-offs.

Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture chains twelve 1:50 worm gear reductions so the final gear, embedded in concrete, would take over two trillion years to turn once.

A short video of a Boeing 777 wing being tested to destruction, finally breaking at 154 percent of its designed limit load. The wing is flexed upward until it fails.

A LockPickingLawyer video in which a locksmith claims his videos are fake and challenges him; he responds by picking the lock. It is a short, typical LPL demonstration.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

Jay Leno tours and drives a 1925 Doble E-20 steam car, once owned by Howard Hughes, covering how it starts up and runs. It includes a cutaway view of the engine.

Dan Gelbart shows his home-built air bearing CNC lathe and grinder, which reaches about 1 micron accuracy. He demonstrates the machine and its parts.

NightHawkInLight demonstrates how a Tesla valve works by sending a propane flame front through one, making the flow visible. It is a short, hands-on experiment video.

Clickspring makes the pin-and-slot epicyclic gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism, the module modelling the Moon's variable motion in the Greek theory, by hand.

Mark Rober builds a machine that plays the Cyclone arcade game with perfect timing and discovers the game is rigged so that perfect play still loses. The video explains the physics and electronics tricks behind carnival-style skill games.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

Stuff Made Here builds a device that lets a blind person perceive their surroundings by touch, using an iPad's lidar and a mechanical tactile display driven by motors. The video walks through the build and the limits he hit.

Matthias Wandel shows how his pantorouter, a template router machine, works. The flexible machine cuts joints such as mortise and tenon and dovetails, and plans are available.

Hobbyist Wesley Kagan shows his Miata running and driving with a homemade version of Koenigsegg's freevalve camless valve technology. The build uses open CAD files and code and he describes it as an ongoing work in progress.

InRangeTV's controlled mud test of an AKM, covering it in mud and testing whether it still fires, in a series that also tested the M1, M14 and AR-15.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers. It is part of a pyramid-mysteries channel.

A look at how granite surface plates are inspected, calibrated and reconditioned using an autocollimator, a repeat meter and diamond-charged cast iron laps. Measurements are at the level of millionths of an inch.

The Hydraulic Press Channel folds an A3 sheet of paper past the supposed seven-fold limit and then crushes it with a press. It is a short, quirky experiment.

Theo Jansen shows many of his Strandbeests, wind-powered walking kinetic sculptures, set to Khachaturian's Spartacus. It presents his work since 1990 on creating new forms of life on beaches.

InRangeTV subjects an AR-15 to a mud test in the same mud and location as a preceding AK-47 test. It shows how the rifle runs when covered in mud.

Arend Schwab demonstrates a research bicycle, the two-mass-skate design, that balances itself without gyroscopic effects or trail. It challenges the common explanations for why a moving bicycle stays upright.

Stuff Made Here designs and builds an "unpickable" lock, then calls in a locksmith to see if it can be defeated. It covers the mechanical design effort and the attempt to pick it.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.

A demo of the Cubli, a 15 cm cube that uses reaction wheels to jump up onto a corner, balance there and fall in a controlled way to move. The video shows these three abilities chained into locomotion.

A short demonstration of the MONIAC, Bill Phillips' hydro-mechanical economic computer, at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand museum. It shows how water flows model an economy's money flows.

Chris Boden shows how an operator starts a large hydroelectric turbine generator and manually synchronizes it to the grid using a needle phase meter.

Adam Savage and engineer Kipp Bradford build a compact wearable refrigeration system to keep Adam cool under costumes, modeled on the cooling unit in a NASA spacesuit simulator. It is a long, hands-on build session.

A controlled demonstration by Wabash National of a tank trailer collapsing under vacuum, staged at an industry expo. The tank implodes as air is pulled out.

Terry Davis, author of TempleOS, demonstrates his SimStructure physics simulator and builds a PID controller using math from Numerical Recipes in C. The description notes PID controllers are used in everything from rockets to espresso machines.