I have previously written about Harry Eng’s Impossible Bottles but there is another style of beautiful engineering which is not so much impossible but involves painstaking dedication, ingenuity, and sometimes a touch of insanity.

Exhibit A: Handmade Vacuum Tubes

Claude Pilliard enjoys creating vacuum tube amplifiers from scratch, as seen in this step-by-step video.

Exhibit B: Binary Adding Machine in Wood

An elegant adding machine made of wood and using marbles to represent numbers in binary, complete with correct handling of numeric overflow.

More information and other wooden marble contraptions here.

Exhibit C: Home Made Coding Machine

Beautifully engineered Enigma-like "coding machine" hand made by Tatjana van Vark.

“Each wheel has 509 parts.” Incredible!

Exhibit D: Jet Powered Beetle

I have previously written about Ron Patrick’s rather unique home-modified WV Beetle, and I remain impressed with his engineering skills.

It is street legal and technically a “hybrid”, since it has two methods of propulsion.

What a nutcase!