Giant Transformers sculptures made from recycled automobile and truck parts

Follow the link to Wired.com for more pics of Optimus and Bumblebee…

This amazing motion capture film ventures inside what is said to be the largest steel processing plant in the world, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, in the city of Magnitogorsk, in Chelyabinsk Province, Russia.

The incredible imagery and contemplative soundtrack give an ordinarily very grimy and no doubt uncomfortable setting a highly transcendent quality.

A series of four videos that document the process of making of a Japanese Katana, from smelting to polishing. The amount of skill, effort & dedication demonstrated by the craftsmen in this videos is as impressive as the finished product.

kontraptionist:

There’s just something about good aluminum that looks….good!  This is alloy 6013 - Pricey stuff, it’s fairly hard and takes a good polish. You can actually make low volume injection molds with it, though more modern alloys have taken it’s place in that role.  There are actually a bunch of different aluminum alloys. Generally speaking, the softer the aluminum, the more pure it is, the better it is at conducting heat and electricity, the better it welds, bends and resists corrosion. All this sounds good until you need to CUT it and use it for anything structural, then it just gums up tools.. imagine trying to drill a hole in a piece of brie cheese. That’s what it’s like working with pure aluminum. Pretty much it’s only good for foil, wire, and electrical contacts.

A simply superb short film of a man executing his craft from start to finish. The hand-made custom bike frames are impressive on their own, but everything about this video is inspirational. From the expert use of tooling to the well refined processes, the camera angles to the soundtrack, this really adds fuel to my dimly burning creative fire.

kontraptionist:

I shamelessly squandered 410 of my 500 weekly Vimeo megabytes on one HD video of a bronze tube being bored out to 2” on the manual lathe. You can see that on a lathe, the workpiece is rotated, and the cutting tool remains mostly stationary. All sorts of round pieces can be cut like this - Think chess pieces for example.  This particular cut a little aggressive, so it’s noisy. The camera’s automatic audio gain circuit kicked in for sure. You can hear a few hammering noises part way through. Those were caused by bubbles - literally, voids in the bronze that were interrupting the cut. No harm done - The finish near the voids always has a little waves, but those can be almost eliminated by doing multiple light finishing passes. In this case, however, it’s completely hidden, so it doesn’t matter either way.

Metal cutting is the coolest.