Balm to my soul
I have discovered the most soothing genre of YouTube videos ever. Forget your nature sounds and your guided meditations, let me turn you on to rusty machinery restoration.
Well, actually, the genre doesn’t have a name. There’s no specific person or channel doing them (though the Russians seem fond of them). It’s just, once I watched one, YT kept recommending new ones to me.
They all start with a rusty tool or piece of machinery. Then silently, without a word, a gloved pair of hands disassembles the machine bolt by screw. Quiet little scraping and clanking tool noises, that’s all.
In comes a bewildering variety of chemical, electrical and mechanical de-rusting procedures. De-greasing, painting, re-greasing, replacing bits. Then it all goes back together again, screw by bolt and the whateveritis is fired up.
Honestly, the before and after is indescribably satisfying. I recommend watching with the fast playback turned on.
Deep breath, here we go. Old Soviet chainsaw (pictured above). Hand drill. Electric grinder. Circular saw. Roto tiller. Hand crank grinder.
Once you start watching these, you’re bound to be offered more.
I just wanted to find a way to de-rust something from the storeroom. I wasn’t looking for porn, honest!
Posted: July 30th, 2019 under technology.
Comments: 11
Comments
Comment from Drew458
Time: July 30, 2019, 9:53 pm
I should make a video about cleaning up a rusty shovel. Take a big bucket of sand and a quart or two of old motor oil. Mix. Dip the shovel in and out of the sand a few hundred times. The rust comes right off. I suppose you could then de-grease it and spray some Rustoleum on it. And apply linseed oil to the handle, why not? That should net me a few thousand followers, right?
When she discovers knife sharpening videos, it will be all over.
Comment from Mitchell
Time: July 30, 2019, 10:56 pm
“I just wanted to find a way to de-rust something from the storeroom. I wasn’t looking for porn, honest!”
Yeah, sure. Go ahead and pull the other one now.
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: July 31, 2019, 1:24 am
Go for the really cool stuff – get the videos of them pulling a WWII tank (usually vehicles of one of the two evil empires that duked it out ) from of the mud of a bog somewhere or from the bottom of a lake in East Overshoeia – watch em clean the engine out, and fire the buggers up!
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: July 31, 2019, 2:34 am
My secret youtube vice is watching industrial shredders at work. Watching a bunch of 55 gallon steel drums getting munched into little bits is somehow quite satisfying. Even better are the ones that can handle engine blocks, transmissions, and even whole motorcycles. But the best one can chew up an entire delivery truck, tires and all. Great stuff! And there are quite a number of them.
If watching utter destruction isn’t your thing, then the videos showing skillful operation of heavy equipment can be engrossing. What some guys can do with loaders, dozers, backhoes, etc., is amazing!
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: July 31, 2019, 4:21 am
My personal favorite is “Lil Giants Construction Company”.
https://www.scale4x4rc.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25724
The blogger is a Canadian farmer (divorced oddly enough) who is intensely busy farming during the few months of summer Canada gets, but has absolutely nothing to do when the growing season is over, and being out in the vast emptiness of the great prairie has few options for entertainment.
Somehow this led him to start excavating the dirt from his “basement” under his farm house as a hobby. However, not with a pickaxe and shovel….but with R/C controlled model excavation equipment – little bulldozers, backhoes, trucks, and so forth. He has been at this for ? 14 or 15? years now, and has more or less finished the basement. He therefore had a new building constructed some (short) distance from his house, and has now finished a tunnel between the new building and the house… all dug with R/C models. And… he’s still excavating.
He tends to video his work process, and well, it’s fascinating, particularly I think because he doesn’t really give a damn if anybody is watching or not.
I have been watching, off and on for two or three years now, watching his progress.
Addicting. I have linked to “page one” from 2008: not the beginning of the project but when he move over from another forum to his current home. You can fast forward some 76 pages to see what he’s up to now…
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: July 31, 2019, 4:37 am
A recent, representative, video of him at work
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: July 31, 2019, 11:03 am
My YouTube vice is watching those two dudes somewhere in southeast Asia building things in the jungle starting out with a couple of hunks of wood and finishing up with a Roman style house with a swimming pool.
Some Veg – OMG!
Comment from peacelovewoodstock
Time: July 31, 2019, 12:07 pm
Same here, stumbled on these a few months ago with help from son who likes to watch an anonymous Japanese guy make knives from odd materials. Same deal, 15 or 20 minutes of just hands working and ambient sound. I think it is an ASMR effect (google it).
Comment from Clifford Skridlow
Time: July 31, 2019, 2:15 pm
Then there’s this guy
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: July 31, 2019, 10:03 pm
Somehow that picture of Charlotte reminds me of this passage:
I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”
from: Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Comment from SCOTTtheBADGER
Time: August 8, 2019, 10:03 am
TYSY Tube on youtube is an enjoyable restorer.
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