Drop an offering into the machine and it rapidly strikes a bell from four directions. The device, called the High-Speed Worldly Desires Removal Machine, automates the 108 bell strikes traditionally associated with New Year's Eve in Japan.
Its creator, known as Ningen no Hashikure, rebuilt an earlier version using traditional Japanese temple architecture as a reference. The wooden-looking bell tower is actually assembled from 3D-printed plastic parts without screws, with electrically operated strikers built into the structure.
A ritual of 108 bell strikes has been turned into a rapid-fire batch operation. Even New Year's Eve bells can apparently be put on fast-forward.
A giant rotating ring displays scrolling text using black and white marbles as pixels. Radial channels around the ring each hold seven marbles to form a vertical column of the display. Once a column has passed, its marbles roll back down to be reused for the next characters.
Creator Ivan Miranda built the mechanism with just three motors to rotate the ring, select the marble colors and feed the marbles into the channels.
To make text scroll, the pixels themselves have to roll around a giant wheel. The display is doing almost as much moving as the message.
Angus from Maker's Muse experimented with covering a tiny combat robot in stiff 3D-printed bristles instead of a conventional shell. The robot competes in a plastic antweight class limited to 150 grams. He printed thin strands between the body and a temporary outer support, then removed the support to expose the bristles along the sides and rear. While earlier robots had suffered broken shells, the hairy version appeared to come through combat largely intact.
Apparently one way to improve a fighting robot's defenses is to give it more hair. The lion's mane has entered the engineering department.
Maker PETCraft tested how many discarded plastic bottles it takes to produce one kilogram of 3D-printing filament: thirteen 5-liter bottles, one 10-liter bottle, two 8-liter bottles and one 1.5-liter bottle, or 17 in total.
The bottles were heat-smoothed, cut into strips with a homemade cutter, then drawn through a heated nozzle and wound into filament. Printing with the result is a future step.
Recycling one kilogram of filament required collecting and processing 17 enormous bottles. Saving material turned into a surprisingly large manufacturing project.
Kazutaka Kurihara's controller prints conductive touch buttons and wiring into one 3D-printed plate. Players wear conductive finger sleeves. AI can change the layout and generate print files, including versions with 16–18 buttons.
Printing the controls together somehow added equipment to the player's fingers.
A Mini 4WD model car has been modified with a mechanism that makes it jump. Creator Zeru designed custom parts for 3D printing and uses rubber bands, rather than an additional powered actuator, as the energy source for the jump.
After several prototypes and adjustments, the car successfully reached a jump height of roughly 40 centimeters using ten rubber bands. The creator sums up the motivation simply: jumping is romantic.
A toy built to race forward gets ten rubber bands so it can develop performance in an entirely new direction. The car has started aiming for the sky.
A fully FDM-printed mechanical calculator performs addition and multiplication by setting digits and turning a hand crank. It uses no electronics; rotations through printed gears perform the calculation, including a mechanical carry mechanism.
3D All Workshop spent about two months developing the design. Because FDM-printed gears are sensitive to tolerances, the mechanism went through roughly one hundred design iterations before it worked reliably.
A cheap calculator can produce the answer instantly, but this one required roughly a hundred mechanical redesigns just to make the gears cooperate. Building the calculator is vastly more work than doing the calculation.
OVODYO displays time by rotating two numbered 12-sided solids until the appropriate faces point upward. One indicates the hour and the other advances in five-minute intervals, with internal gearing rotating each shell around two axes.
Creator ekaggrat singh kalsi built the clock. Because the minute solid only changes every five minutes, LEDs indicate the exact minute between those steps.
Changing a clock digit now requires two polyhedra to physically tumble into new poses. Checking the time has become a tiny mechanical performance.
Franky Candy Dispenser releases candy from a Frankenstein monster's mouth when you press the glowing brain on top of its head. While waiting, its LED eyes blink and look around; pressing the button also triggers spoken lines, sometimes including a reminder to brush your teeth.
Inside the head, a servo-driven 3D-printed Archimedes screw carries the candy to the mouth. The glowing brain is built into a large 100 mm arcade button. The project was created by Adafruit's Ruiz Brothers and Liz Clark.
Press the glowing brain, receive candy from the mouth, then get dental advice from the same monster. The candy dispenser has a remarkably complete personality.
A team including researchers at McGill University developed '3D necroprinting,' which repurposes the proboscis of a female mosquito as a high-resolution 3D-printing nozzle, and the work received the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize in Technology. The proboscis has an inner diameter of roughly 20–30 µm, and the system produced printed lines about 20 µm wide.
The researchers compared several biological dispensing structures, including stingers and fangs, before choosing the mosquito proboscis for its narrow, straight geometry and ability to support continuous flow. Demonstrations included honeycomb structures, a maple leaf, and bioscaffolds containing cells.
Instead of machining a finer nozzle, the researchers looked at a mosquito and realized nature had already attached one. It even won a prize.
Kazuya Shibata's Fully Automatic Disposable Chopstick Splitter 2 is designed to split disposable wooden chopsticks cleanly and evenly. It feeds the chopsticks in, centers and pulls the two halves apart, then uses a circular saw to cut the remaining joint and a belt sander to smooth the ends.
The machine includes suspension to accommodate thickness variations and a self-centering gripping mechanism. Shibata spent about a year developing it, while processing one pair of chopsticks takes roughly four minutes. A task normally finished by hand in a moment has grown into a complete miniature production line.
All this machinery exists to avoid one bad chopstick split, and by the end a circular saw and belt sander have joined the process. The disposable chopsticks are receiving remarkably premium treatment.
Strange Inventions Lab turned an iPhone 13 Pro case into a miniature marble machine. The case contains a track and an Archimedes-screw lift, so tilting the phone sends a ball through the course and raises it for another lap.
The creator describes it as an experimental design that needs a fairly specific angle and can occasionally jam. It uses 19 screws and 12 ball bearings to add a complete mechanical toy to an object normally designed to stay thin and unobtrusive.
Phone cases are usually designed to disappear around the phone. This one adds a whole marble amusement park instead.
A ritual of 108 bell strikes has been turned into a rapid-fire batch operation. Even New Year's Eve bells can apparently be put on fast-forward.