Wooden Gears

Unfortunately there's no information in English on this Japanese craftsman's incredible mechanical wooden sculptures. His YouTube profile lists his occupation as pharmacist (apparently he's a pharmacist with some crazy woodworking skills). These little mechanical workhorses a ...more

Alan Parekh's latest creation is a clock made from wooden gears.  Parekh says on Hacked Gadgets: "The clock...consists of a bunch of wooden gears, a PIC microcontroller and a stepper motor. The heart of the clock is a PIC 16f628A microcontroller. This microcontroller has an ...more

Gears: a set of toothed wheels that work together to alter the relation between the speed of a driving mechanism (such as the engine) and the speed of the driven parts (the wheels). What if those "wheels" were shaped like squares? Or ovals? Or fish? Clayton Boyle is an engine ...more

LEGO technic builder Sariel presents a mighty impressive weekend project: a motorized LEGO hand that emulates actual human movement. This feat of plastic engineering runs on a combination of electric motors and pneumatic valves. Says Sariel, "The most complex part of the arm ...more

You've seen his explanation of a combination lock's inner workings. You'll never lose another game of Jenga, thanks to his winning wooden pistol. And nearly 4 million YouTube users have marveled at his wooden marble machine sculpture. He's Matthias Wandel, and he's accomplishe ...more

We see Steampunk props all the time and wonder where the maker found all their pieces. In fact, for some people it's almost like a game to examine each prop and see if they can name all of the original parts. However, for a newcomer (or a novice at prop-making), it may be rea ...more

One of the more enjoyable parts of Christmas (other than opening gifts of course) is going out to find the perfect tree, struggle bringing it into the house, and decorating it. As the years went by, I realized that our tree looked exactly like every other tree in the neighborh ...more

One amazing Japanese papercraft enthusiast has built a walking 'robot' that's made of nothing more than paper, rubber bands, and a few wooden shafts for stability. It's been dubbed the 'Paper Robot III,' and even the cogs and gears are made of paper. The creator made a video d ...more

As I said in this earlier post, there's no easy way to explain or define the Steampunk aesthetic. There are a large number of Steampunk tropes or "cues", as I call them, that bring to mind the feeling of Steampunk. These cues combine to push past the "not-Steampunk" threshold ...more