A basketball hoop that doesn’t let you miss? The world’s smallest bike? An “unpickable” lock?
No matter what Shane Wighton makes to showcase on his YouTube channel, Stuff Made Here, the only true constant is that it’ll take some time to make—and that his wife will (in good faith) tease him about it.
The engineer builds plenty interesting and entertaining inventions. His ultimate hope for his creations is that they might inspire other people to discover “the joy of engineering, fabricating and creating things out of nothing.”
Wighton obviously has a lot of ingenuity. When he decides to create a new idea, he goes through plenty of iterations as the object goes from brainstorm to prototype to final product. And when it comes to the building process, Wighton spares no detail when explaining what he’s doing and why it’s important to the build. The descriptions of his intricate machines will make viewers appreciate the amount of work that goes into each upload.
And on that note, sometimes Wighton’s videos are pretty long, because the project doesn’t work the way he intended. He runs into errors and bugs, and pieces break or don’t function how he expected them to. But in each case, he doesn’t give up on his idea, instead hypothesizing what may be causing the issue and finding workarounds or solutions to fix it. His perseverance makes the final (successful) iteration feel all the more satisfying, and his example may inspire others to push through their setbacks, too.
That said, Wighton warns avid inventors out there that a lot of what he does can be dangerous without the proper care.
We heard one instance in which Wighton said “crappy.” He describes a frustrating part of one video as “entering integration hell.”
Stuff Made Here is a fun (though at times highly technical) channel with very few hiccups to note. Realistically, the only cause for parental concern would be your child attempting to make his or her own version of Wighton’s explosive home run bat.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
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