Car morticians

A forklift places a Dodge Caravan into a car crusher, and it gets crushed. Then another car gets loaded in and it get crushed. Then another and another and another until we have a stack of crushed cars. In the video below we have a car shredder. Drop a car into the bin and it gets randomly disassembled.

I suppose to a motorhead, thinking of when these cars were new and sparkly on a dealer's lot, this is all a bit of a tragedy. To the rest of us it is oddly fascinating.

  

An old-timey assembly line

This is a film from sometimes in the 1950s showing an automated assembly line machining engine blocks and other parts. The automation was largely controlled by limit switchs.  While they work well, once set up there is very little flexibility in the processes of an assembly line. Modern computer-controlled switching can be more generalized, changing tasks on the fly as needed.

  

The puzzle of mechanical stitching

I had never considered the complexity of the problem engineers faced in designing a sewing machine. With hand stitching, you push down through the fabric and the reverse the needle to push back up through again drawing the thread along. Sewing machines simply push the needle up and down without reversing it, so new methods of sewing needed to be designed. 

 

A new hobby idea for the winter

With winter nearing I'm sure that many of you, those who are too stupid to live in pleasant climes, will be stuck in your houses looking for a winter hobby to occupy your frigid and dreary hours. May I suggest making miniature chain link fences? It's kind of like knitting, only instead of a sweater you get a tiny chain link fence for your efforts. A great addition to your daughter's dollhouse or any diorama you may be building.

Above is a home-built machine to make the chain links. I chose it because the machining of it was so nicely done. If you look around the internet you can find much simpler contraptions to do the same thing. 

 

The inner workings of a gumball machine

Above is a video of a 3D animation that explains the mechanism of the humble and ubiquitous gumball machine. It was created by Jared Owen, who I've featured before in the post Mysteries of a clicky pen and other things. Enjoy.

 

DIY cardboard useless box

Spinning levers

Desi Old Black engine at work

Villagers fire up a Desi Old Black engine and connect a belt driven contraption (I have no idea what it is doing) to it. The young boy in the beginning seems to be delighted that he is being filmed helping.

A home made claw machine

Lord, but this is one complicated assembly made out of cardboard, syringes and plastic tubes. Of course, if you want to build one and make it even more realistic you'll need to make the claw's grip weaker so the stuffed toys keep falling out of its grip before you can get them.

A small and complex machine

A nicely filmed video that shows the design and fabrication of a Patek Philippe wristwatch. The effort and care put into machining, finishing and then assembling the tiny parts of the watch's mechanism is amazing.

In an earlier post The evolution of complexity in watches I did reflect upon how deceptive the apparent complexity of watches could be:

Above are three main types of time pieces: ... a cheap crystal watch, ... a mechanical watch's mechanism, ... a digital alarm clock.

Of the three the mechanical watch visually seems to be the most complex, but there is little doubt that the digital clock is actually more complex by orders of magnitude. While the switches, LEDs, capacitors and resistors are simple enough, hidden within the IC chip, and discernible only by microscope, are circuits of immense complexity.

Indeed, just like extremely large scales escape us, our perception is far too crude to make real sense of something so small. In the end we only see a slice of reality.

Machine to make a DIY spring

An old shingle mill in action

Prior to asphalt and other modern materials, wood shingles were widely used on roofs. The above video show an old shingle mill in action as it cuts the old-timey wedge shaped wooden shingles from a log.

Inner workings of an AR-15

For whatever reason machinery always fascinates me. The above video is a detailed animation of the mechanics of loading, firing and ejecting a shell in an AR-15.

The video was found via Knuckledraggin My Life Away's post: The best AR animation video I’ve ever seen. Knuckledraggin' has a lot of interesting posts. I've added a link to the site in the Recommended link list. Give them a visit.

The ugly side of ice cream

Above is a video of a restored 1944 Dairy Queen ice cream making machine. The behind the scenes machinery of making ice cream is certainly grittier than a brightly lit and colorful ice cream parlor.
 

Fixing a Flat

The above video shows how to apply a patch to a large $30,000 tire from an earth moving machine.

The Clayton Disinfector

Click on any image to enlarge

When I was young they scared us to death with atomic war. Fallout shelters, mutants, duck-and-cover and all that. Now I've noticed they scare people to death with pandemics. AIDS, bird flu, Ebola -- even a cholera outbreak in Haiti.

Neither world-wide devastation fear has come true yet. In the present epidemics have been largely localized,  but in the past epidemics and plagues were a sad part of life. People of my parents' age spoke of the horrors of polio -- the Saulk vaccine was a miracle to them.

By the end of the 19th century they knew rats and fleas carried disease. They also knew fumigation could help clear contaminated buildings and ships.

A machine used on large spaces was the Clayton Disinfector. It burned sulfur to create fumes, cooled them and then pumped them into the space needed fumigation. It was used on hospitals and other large infected buildings. It was also mounted on tugs to fumigate ships entering harbor (shown in the drawing below).