Great news. Our pal Simone Giertz, the awesomely talented, eccentric Swedish maker whose projects we’ve featured here on Make: before has become part of the Tested team with Adam Savage.
For their first project, over Skype (and international mail), Simone and Adam collaborate on building one of Simone’s crazy creations. Simone gets a kick out of those ridiculous beer helmets and so she had the idea of creating a similar, mechanized head contraption that could feed her giant handfuls of popcorn.
While the project is obviously very silly, and in the end it barely even works, videos like this are still valuable beyond their entertainment value (Simone and Adam definitely have some laughs over the whole business). Watching it, you gain useful insights into the collaborative process and thinking through and implementing a design. Over the course of the video, you also get a little tutorial on vacuum forming (on Adam’s awesome-looking homemade machine), how Adam goes about thinking through the design of the hand feeding mechanism, and how Simone works out the control and actuation and putting the whole Rube Goldberg assemblage together. It’s always fascinating to watch Adam work. Even he is impressed by the speed with which he bodges together the basic feeding mechanism.
We at Make: congratulate Simone on her new gig and can’t wait to see what sorts of things she builds with Adam and the Tested team going forward. Oh, and by the way, despite all appearances to the contrary, Simone’s last name is pronounced “Yetch.” As Simone says: “It doesn’t make any sense in Swedish, either.”
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