Portent

This is almost certainly one that should be filed under the “Don’t try this at home” category. Mankind’s ingenuity has developed many different types of weapons of which one of the most nasty is a flame thrower. They have their uses- clearing bunkers and caves in wartime. Of course one of the things you don’t realise is that man carried flame throwers made the wearer a bit vulnerable- one stray bullet and you become a human torch as the fuel was carried under pressure and …

So it’s a bit of a risky thing to try - I could easily see anyone doing this ending up in the Darwin Awards one year so try it at your own risk… But it’s still fun to look at someone else doing it!

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Popularity: 28% [?]

I bought a clock made from watch parts once, when I stayed in the Anjoa hotel in Leeds in 1991. The watch parts were arranged around the actual clock face i.e. decorative not functional. I think it cost me £35. The owner was selling them.

These 16 motorbike models are also made from watch parts. They are just exquisite.

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Popularity: 32% [?]

PBR (Public Broadcasting Radio) in the USA is the nearest equivalent to the BBC in the UK. One of their longest running broadcasts has been Engines of Ingenuity that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Written and hosted by John Lienhard, it is heard nationally on Public Radio and produced by the US radio station KUHF-FM Houston. The website is hosted at the University of Houston.

Fascinatingly they have all 2,299 episodes (it’s been running since 1988!) transcribed and available to read free on the site. An amazing amount. If you want to read stories about the famous and not so famous who helped shape our society this is a good place to start. Recommended.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

This is brilliant. Someone created a small robot- well more like a harness, for the Nintendo Wii bowling game using the Lego robotics system Lego Mindstorms. It moves the Wiimote absolutely perfectly so that it can score a perfect 100% (a 300 score!) on the game.

It’s a heck of a way to cheat! You can watch it in operation on the page- there’s a video!

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Popularity: 19% [?]

This is both bizarre looking and a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s a steam powered locomotive with a centipede like locomotion method. It’s not a fake, there is a video on the linked page that shows in being operated by remote control.

Steampunk is a genre of writing that posits Victorians with advanced technology based on steam and coal not oil. The steamtoys page on this site shows many other marvellous mechanical steam driven beasties including the steam driven ancestor of R2D2!

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Imagine fitting jet turbine engines (small ones) to the likes of pickup trucks or Sinclair C5s. Ideal for racing boy racers off from traffic lights though somehow I cannot see these as being exactly road worthy.

That’s what this website is about- with photos of descriptions. Fancy a turbo jet go-kart? There are also videos of some of the tests. Fascinating stuff!

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Popularity: 14% [?]

This is quite clever. In all CPUs there are circuits for doing arithmetic. One is an adder. It er adds numbers. It works in binary (all ones and zeroes). If you add 1 to 1 you 10 (in binary- the equivalent of 2 in decimal). You can read more about adders on wikipedia.

Matthias Wandell is into making things in wood. So he has implemented an adder in wood using marbles. In fact he does a lot of stuff in wood, and his site is an excellent tribute to one of the oldest materials and its uses! Theres a video of the adder in operation on this page as well. It’s very ingenious and not a bad way to demonstrate binary addition.

If you don’t like wood he also has a Lego version and other lego machines on this page.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Watching a solid chunk of metal being carved by a machine into a high precision engine block is just amazing. When you realise that the accuracy of the carving is fractions of a millimetre, the precision of the carving robot is a wonder.

This 10 minute video shows the block, from start to finished block. An incredible testimony to modern engineering.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Diesel (or PetroDiesel to distinguish it from BioDiesel) is derived from distilling Petroleum. A gallon of gas (sorry Petrol) has about 15% less energy than a gallon of diesel and in cars the difference can be 40% more mileage for diesel engined vehicles than petrol.

Of course Petrodiesel is a fossil fuel. It takes millions of years to make and how much better would it be to convert to biodiesel which is biodegradable and non-toxic, and refers to alkyl esters made from the transesterification of both vegetable oils and/or animal fats. Diesel engines made before 1992 should generally not use biodiesel as it can perish rubber seals.

If however you are interested in using biodiesel (its cheaper in the UK- 20p tax (less) per litre), then biomotors.co.uk is an interesting site to check out. I always thought you could just put biodiesel straight in but it appears to be a little more complex than that. Read about it on the site.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

And they don’t come any bigger than this awesome monstrosity that weighs 2300 for the 14 cylinder version. Sure it only does 102 RPM max, and yes it drinks fuel at an inordinate rate- but it does produce 108,920 hp.

Yes that is a man standing between cylinders 4 and 5- this is a very big engine. Each cylinder stroke is 98″. This is a Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel engine produced by Japan Diesel Co in 6-14 cylinder versions. Big container ships use them.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

The efficiency of the Internal Combustion engine has not significantly increased over the last few years. Oh sure there have marginal increases, using turbo-charging but the most efficient has been diesel. That's only because a gallon of diesel has 25% more energy than a gallon of gas.

There was of course the Wankel Rotary engine which has had modest success, but the Scuderi Air Hybrid (illustrated) promises much higher efficiency- with less thermal losses through a split cycle with separate compression and combustion chambers and ignition after dead centre.

The figures quoted are 33% for 4 stroke petrol engines and 40% for Air Hybrid. This has been developed on computer (so was a Boeing 777 and it flew!) but a real engine is being built.

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Popularity: 10% [?]