Primitive Technology: Water powered forge blower
Adults EngineeringI made a water powered forge blower to blow air into a furnace. Getting running water to power a blower had been on my list for a while now and the weather had been wet enough to cause enough flow in the creek to try one.
Why Don’t Railroads Need Expansion Joints?
Adults EngineeringHow Thermite turned the clickety-clack of railroads into seamless, silent tracks.
China’s MELTDOWN-PROOF Nuclear Reactor
Adults EngineeringThis year, the first next next generation nuclear reactor expected to enter operation passed a huge milestone. Scientists and engineers in China proved that the reactor was, in theory, MELTDOWN-PROOF.
Primitive Technology: Water Bellows smelt
Adults EngineeringI tested the water bellows with a smelt and it produced a small amount of iron from the ore. The concept has a lot of potential but is having some issues.
Primitive Technology: Water Bellows (uses water instead of leather)
Adults EngineeringI built a Water Bellows. It’s an upside-down clay pot with an inlet valve and an outlet spout. The inlet valve is simply a hole in the pot with a leaf plastered to the inside with wet clay so that it forms a one-way flap valve.
Primitive Technology: One-Way Blower Iron Smelt & Forging Experiment
Adults EngineeringI tested the one-way spinning blower in an iron smelt and it is more effective than the previous both way spinning blower.
Why Climbers Trust Rubber With Their Lives
Adults EngineeringWhy is rubber so “sticky”? Why does rubber consistently have one of the highest coefficients of friction?
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
Adults EngineeringThe blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.
Primitive Technology: Downdraft Kiln
Adults EngineeringA Phoenix kiln is a type of downdraft kiln where the firebox is below the ware chamber.
Primitive Technology: Wood Ash Insulated Furnace
Adults EngineeringI made a furnace insulated with wood ash to smelt iron in. Furnace insulation stops heat being lost from the walls of a furnace and so increases the heat within the furnace.
Primitive Technology: New Brick Kiln Design
Adults EngineeringI cleared an area as a workspace for making bricks, trialed a new source of clay for brick making and tested a new kiln variant that uses fewer bricks than the previous design.
Explaining concrete while getting buried in it
Adults EngineeringConcrete = cement + sand + gravel. Cement is the most important man-made material on Earth.
How NASA Reinvented The Wheel
Adults EngineeringA huge thanks to everyone at NASA Glenn Research Center for having us at the SLOPE Lab, showing their work on this indestructible tire, and helping with the science and animation.
rimitive Technology: Decarburization of iron and forging experiments
Adults EngineeringI took a brittle, high carbon/iron alloy (cast iron) made from local ore and used a decarburization method to reduce it's carbon content making it malleable and forged it flat by hammering.
Primitive Technology: Smelting Iron In Brick Furnaces
Adults EngineeringI made 3 furnaces from bricks using different configurations to test their effectiveness. The benefit of using bricks to make a furnace is that it's quicker, easier, re-useable and portable relative to a furnace constructed in-situ from clay.
Primitive Technology: Rock-Throwing Catapult (Trebuchet)
Adults EngineeringI built a trebuchet, a type of catapult that uses a counter weight to store gravitational potential energy which is then used to fire a projectile via a sling.
Primitive Technology: Trebuchet
Adults EngineeringI built a trebuchet, a type of catapult that uses a counter weight to store gravitational potential energy which is then used to fire a projectile via a sling.
Primitive Technology: Improved Multi-Blade Blower
Adults EngineeringIn the 6 years since I developed the first forge blower I had made very few improvements to it's design.
Building the impossible: Golden Gate Bridge - Alex Gendler
Adults EngineeringExplore the construction of California’s Golden Gate Bridge, and dig into the engineering innovations that made the structure possible.
Paving machine
Adults EngineeringTiger-Stone is a Dutch made paving machine that uses gravity and an electric motor to print stone and brick roads. It's a six meter wide machine that is capable of laying 300 square meters of road a day.