Sure, why not? Here's the wheel-less bike an engineer made

I kind of assumed that was the case given it’s exactly the same idea, only with a minimal form factor for the “wheels” (treads) rather than the previous maximal square shapes. Another riff on the same gag.

If he had angled the wheels as \ / he could have gained a modicum of usefulness, hence he did the opposite

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He ~“spent so much time thinking about whether he COULD do it that he didn’t think about whether he SHOULD do it”?

This was obviously a silly project for fun, so your comment doesn’t really apply, but more in general: engineers improve things that “ain’t broke” all the time. Jet liners from the '60s worked just fine, but the ones used today get like twice as many passenger-kilometers out of the same amount of fuel. Or to quote some civil engineer: “any idiot can make a bridge that stays up. It takes a good engineer to make a bridge that only just stays up”.

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“Finally, someone’s made a mode of transportation that’s as fast as walking with 10 times the effort.”

That’s just some golden snark right there. I LOVE IT!

Next step: adequate gearing so you don’t have to pedal so fast (but maybe with a bit more push).
Next next step: caterpillar treads made out of hard rubber so they’re not actually deafening.
I wonder why he chose the angles he did for the tread bars? They could have looked FAR more ridiculous pointing the other way in each case…

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That’s how I do it, even though I do have a little drill press.

Yeah, seriously. I ran the video at 2x speed and it was still too slow to keep my attention. I worked on a script in my second monitor while it ran and didn’t really get much interesting until the last 1.5 minutes … and stopped that after about 15 seconds (30 seconds of subjective play time.)

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unless you got that extra large bum all those ‘pot holes’ are going to make you a slow coach…

This is why you tinker and do stupid shit: you never know what knowledge you’ll gain. That knowledge may certainly be “that was a fucking mistake”, but you’ll at least have learned something.

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Never seen the process of making the machine that’s demonstrated at the end referred to as “filler”. Then again, I don’t start sweating after 15 seconds watching a video.

“This man is going out of his way to prove a point no one ever has ever argued with him over.”

I’m a mechanical engineer. We (especially my fellow male engineers) like to think of ourselves as objective solvers of problems, and we mostly are, but every now and then, we want to solve problems that don’t exist. You know, for fun.

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It’s hard to be sure, but I think this guy’s day job is as an engineer. That doesn’t mean he does proper engineering projects on his channel. The point of the video is to demonstrate what can mechanically be done in an amusing way, not to build a practical invention.

I think it’s a case of audience/viewer mismatch here. I think the intended audience is the same basic market as people who watch Adam Savage’s Tested. Makers who want to see how the thing was made from a workshop perspective as much or more than the finished result.

It’s not even that. It’s built for the thumbnail, and that’s all.

Thumbnails in YT videos are immensely important. The algorithm puts extreme weight on click through. Because of that, you get channels like this guy who’s business model is to think of what would make an insane clickbait thumbnail first, then work backwards to figure out how to make a video about making some approximation of that thing.

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Step bits are for sheet metal, and are by far the best tool for that job. Regular drills chew up sheet metal and are dangerous. Source- I’m a machinist and metalworker.

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