MachinePix Weekly #35

This week's most popular post was a peek inside a CT scanner 👩🏻‍⚕️ Next week's interview: the woman who ran New Product Introduction for Tesla ⚡️🚗

Volkswagen just announced a $14B battery deal, Daimler is on the record saying it’s stopping ICE development, and the Mustang, Hummer, and F150—the Holy Trinity of red-blooded macho vehicles—have all gone electric; it’s easy to say that EVs are inevitable.

This wasn’t the case at all in 2007 when Milo Werner joined strange little company called Tesla as a manufacturing engineer, where over the course of nine years she ended up running New Product Introduction for Powertrain and Vehicles including the Model S and X. She’ll be joining me in next week’s interview to talk about the challenges along the way!

The most popular post this week was a video of a CT scanner’s interior. I spent a lot of time trying to identify this model, and based on the bed design and enclosure shape, I believe it’s the CT 6000 iCT or the CT 5000.

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Interior of a Philips CT scanner.

I’m always looking for interesting people to interview, have anyone in mind?

—Kane

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The Week in Review

Closing the loop on the (more) popular scrap rebar straightening machine.

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G2L32E-2 rebar bender by TJK Machinery.

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When I see something like this it feels hard to overstate how much efficiency solid-state and digital systems have added to ~everything~. These can be had at auction for a few hundred dollars.

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Panwriter Mac M-45 typewriter by Nippon Typewriter Company has ~2,200 characters.

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It never ceases to amaze me how much nuance exists in masonry.

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Making split face blocks with a hydraulic splitter.

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This is a fun whimsical machine—the true scale of industrial potatoes is wild.

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Potato digger attachment on a TZ-4K-14 tractor.

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Postscript

There’s a little tune I’ve hummed to myself for as long as I can remember, and it’s from a Buddhist chant box my grandmother had. I finally tracked one down, and it’s a quirky little single-purpose device:

Kane @kane

Here’s a quirky artifact of modernity: a tinny lo-fi device that plays Buddhist chants on loop. My grandmother had one for the home shrine in Taiwan, and I tracked one down. I find it soothing.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to friends (and interesting enemies). I am always looking to connect with interesting people and learn about interesting machines—reach out.

—Kane