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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Folks on YouTube cut, heat, and flatten PVC and then scratch build scale models out of it.

This working excavator is rather extraordinary.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qam0DmWq_No&pp=ygUTcHZjIHBpcGU...

This might be the craziest thing I have ever seen. How is this even possible? He doesn't measure or mark anything?? How can it fit together? How are the repeated parts so perfectly identical?

It even has windshield wipers, that's pretty wild: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qam0DmWq_No&t=48m1s

He hand drilled each and every hole for the perforated step plates. Just in awe of both the skill and the patience.

He also seems to be working with several tools he made himself.

I've only gotten to the part where he makes the gear... despite having a few jigs, I can't get over how much he's doing by hand and by eye with sufficient precision. The teeth were hand drawn and match up with the spacing of the tracks made earlier. Very impressive work.

https://youtu.be/qam0DmWq_No?t=971

this is fucking amazing. stencil a photo from a screen and trace it on to an object.

i am generally hateful towards 5 minute crafts but this is serious engineering.

The style is similar to the way dovetails were cut by hand in drawers before dovetail machines became a thing.

That's amazing. Some kid from some small town in Northern Vietnam, who is a genius.

This deserves its own HN post.

Agreed, submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37534779

When I saw the finished model at the start of the video, my first thought was "clearly there must be some PVC sheets used". You clearly said that he's flattening the tubing with heat, but my brain just couldn't accept the work involved in doing that for every flat surface I was seeing. Truly remarkable.

PVC is quite toxic in a variety of ways. I would never heat, cut PVC voluntarily, especially without full breathing protection

I was wondering about that myself... It also gave me the willies when he was using the table saw cutting those tiny little strips with his fingers so close to the blade!

It’s not a blade, it’s a sanding disk (at least the one seen in the first few minutes of the video).

ah, that's a relief!

Realistically, given the tiny size of that table saw and the small parts needed to cut, what other way would there be to use it?

He could have used another piece of pvc instead of his finger

We never see his face so I'm not sure where your assumptions are coming from, but I'm sure someone with enough PVC experience to make a working model excavator out of PVC is probably taking the necessary safety precautions..

I think this sequence is sufficient to infer that their approach to safety is not commensurate with their engineering skill. https://youtu.be/Z6JvAZHJCAo?si=y-nWawnkC_mIAvVM&t=123

Talent at fabrication and wisdom/access to adequate PPE's are almost entirely uncorrelated

I started watching this and couldn't stop. It is ridiculously impressive.

I would guess he would have used some CAD tool to design this excavator? It had to have been very carefully thought out to ensure proper access to put the pieces together and take them back apart all along the way. Does he say in other videos what he uses?

I would have assumed the same, but at 16:08 and 17:58 he's sketching parts by hand overlaid on a computer monitor with reference images

What a mad man

I came here to post about this. Very impressive. I wonder how he got the model to such high level of 3d Fidelity. Can PVC objects be additively manufactured?

This is astounding. What I want to know is, how does one have that much free time?

The channel has 500k subscribers, so it's probably a full time job/business. I wouldn't be surprised if they take shortcuts by having parts made off camera by "helpers".

At the end of the day, these things are entertainment for us to consume and they don't have to show us all the effort happening off-camera.

I say this generally for these kinds of channels, not this one specifically.

Is it “free time” though when they post multiple videos per month and regularly have several million views?

Fantastic. Thanks.

Impressive, but it hurts me to see how much risk to loose his fingers he takes.

Cool video except they left out all the steps necessary to reach the incredible precision.

This is not how engineers work.

It occasionally cuts to measuring items with calipers, a multimeter, using a compass, and parts show up on screen with score marks, so I assume the creator is definitely measuring things off camera.

The video is an hour long, but the fast scene cuts, and focusing on the actual assembly actions makes the video somehow more compelling and "can't-look-away".

An engineer is not a YouTube video which is essentially a (maybe) narrated highlight reel of a process. I don’t find it disingenuous to condense this down for general consumption because there just is not a ton of value from showing every measurement, each individual cut, and inevitable mess-ups of this process.

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