machines

“The Machines That Made The Jet Age”

“The Machines That Made The Jet Age”

If you like giant machines—and who really doesn’t?—don’t miss Tim Heffernan’s wonderful new feature over at Boing Boing: The magnificent machine pictured above is a closed-die forging press, one of the biggest in the world. (For reference, check out the men standing at its foot, down there on the left.) It and nine other huge […]

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The steam engines of Karsten Gintschel

The steam engines of Karsten Gintschel

That was written in 2009. Rog has an impressive collection of Karsten steam engines, most of which seem to be based on the aeolipile. Gintschel-Modelbau now has a German-language website, but Rog’s page shows many older models not included there.

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Monster Krupp bucket excavator eats stray bulldozers

Monster Krupp bucket excavator eats stray bulldozers

Stumbling upon these photos was a strange moment for me. I’ve been playing Borderlands recently, and it had never occurred to me that the monster excavator from the video game might’ve been based on a real-world machine–a real-world machine which, just by eyeballing it, looks like it might actually be bigger than the video game version. Dark Roasted Blend has a good article with lots of deets on the monster machine.

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Vending machine sits where Zoltar once did

Vending machine sits where Zoltar once did

In MAKE Volume 21, tinkerer Roger Hess wrote about the working replica he made of the Zoltar fortune teller machine from the movie Big. Perhaps we ought to put Roger in touch with Rye Playland, the location of that particular scene. As you can see from this photo from Scouting New York, a Pepsi machine […]

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Human-powered cranes and lifting devices

Human-powered cranes and lifting devices

They just put up a great article about the machines people used to lift and move heavy loads before the advent of steam power. Arguably the pinnacle of human-powered lifting technology were Sir William Fairbairn’s hand-cranked “Tubular Cranes,” one of which is shown above as illustrated in Fairbairn’s 1860 Useful Information for Engineers, Vol. 2:

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