Year: 2011

I can watch this How It’s Made style factory footage for hours. This beast is called a “gabion machine,” which seems to be a slight misnomer. A “gabion” is a cage filled with sand or stone used in civil or military engineering, e.g. for erosion control. What this machine is actually making, of course, is wire mesh of the type used to make gabions, which a lot of people call “chicken wire.” Twisting all those strands at once requires a lot of power—check out the size of the crank.

Comparisons have been made to the Macquarium, though personally I don’t think the 360 is yet at the same stage of obsolescence that as the original Mac when people started making them into aquariums. It was made from a broken console by Spencer Shepard at Blue World Aquariums, who admits, “my Xbox is still safe and sound by my TV.” The window in the side was cut on a waterjet.

Via Dangerous Prototypes: Here’s a video of our presentation about manufacturing open hardware at Make Tokyo Meeting. You can download the slides here.