I'm a long-time Tim Hunkin fan. He's a broad-spectrum enthusiast and maker of things. He runs two coin-op amusement arcades with whimsical handmade machines of his own creation. He also drew a long-running thing-explainer comic strip called Almost Everything There is To Know, and produced and starred in a British TV series called The Secret Life of Machines. — Read the rest
Tim Hunkin, creator of mechanical marvels says, "Peace was one of a number of wooden coin-ops I made around 1980. I used to take them to local fairs and steam rallies." It's a wooden animatronic sculpture of a "Karen" personality. To get it to stop berating you, you have to drop a coin in a slot in its chest. — Read the rest
Avuncular inventor Tim Hunkin of Cabaret Mechanical Theater and Exploratorium fame shares his explanatory videos of mechanical stuff. His latest is "Secret Life of Components — Pneumatics," a witty and interesting demo of various pistons, tubing, valves, controllers, and actuators, all controlled by air pressure. — Read the rest
Maker and explainer Tim Hunkin released the third video in his "Secret Life of Components" series. This time, he's looking at hinges: door hinges, hinges for prototypes, cupboard hinges, kitchen cabinet hinges, hinges for glass doors. custom hinges, giant hinges, tiny hinges, Tufnol hinges, screw thread hinges, and animation hinges.
Earlier this month, Mark excitedly posted about our ol' Make: pal, Tim Hunkin's new YouTube series, The Secret Life of Components. The second video in that series, on LEDs, is now up and it's as wonderful as the first episode (which was about chains). — Read the rest
I'm so glad the amazing Tim Hunkin has a new video series about components! In the first episode, he takes a deep dive into chains — their history, how they work, how they've been refined over the years, and how they are used in machines. — Read the rest
I got to know cartoonist/engineer Tim Hunkin while I was editor-in-chief of Make magazine (here are some of the articles he wrote for me there). Tim has a great sense of humor, and one of the ways he expresses it is by building funny coin-operated amusements with names like "Pet or Meat," "Autofrisk," and "My Nuke – Personal Nuclear Reactor". — Read the rest
It's always fun to watch a master craftsperson at work. In this case, we get to observe a watchmaker named Harry service a Omega Speedmaster Professional, which has 234 parts, and costs $(removed),444 on Amazon.
Consider there are significantly more old watches that need service each year than there are new watches that need to be made, and yet the Swiss invest so significantly into watchmakers for creation and yet barely consider after-sales service.
Here's some fun: "Place hand in dog's cage and hold it there for as long as you dare. Dog pants, dribbles warm saliva and other disgusting things." It's a coin-operated amusement built by Tim Hunkin, and you can see a customer trying it out in this video. — Read the rest
The brilliant artist Tim Hunkin has opened a coin-op amusement arcade in London called Novelty Amusments. Here's a video of his money laundering game. The object is to steal money when regulators aren't looking. You can tell it's just a game because in real life the regulators would be wearing blindfolds.
Matt Taibbi's cover story in this month's Rolling Stone, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" continues his excellent ongoing coverage of the immense corruption and malfeasance before, during and after the finance meltdown. As Tabbi points out, the outright criminality on display during the subprime bubble has resulted in exactly zero jail sentences for the men and women whose fraud destroyed the planet's economy. — Read the rest
I enjoyed reading about the lost art of safecracking in this illustrated lecture by Tim Hunkin.
The nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, became very interested in combination locks while working on the atomic bomb in Los Alomos during the second world war.
For some reason I can't explain, the song "Sneaky Snake" popped into my head this morning. I haven't thought about that song in years—maybe decades, even. It's a silly song about a snake who steals root beer that my sister and I used to sing when we were kids. — Read the rest