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Comment by MengerSponge

6 hours ago

If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.

He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc. https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...

His skeleton clock build is one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, up there with Bartoz's gorgeous webpages: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

I'm a big fan of Clickspring. One really interesting aspect of his Antikythera mechanism videos is that, along with constructing the mechanism itself, he is using the physical details of the recovered artifact to make educated guesses about what sorts of workshop technology were available in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. Including fairly in-the-weeds stuff like entire videos on what sorts of materials a craftsman of that era might have used to lay out marking lines on workpieces or how one might've soldered two metal pieces together.

omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.

i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)

My only complaint with Clickspring is that it takes so long. I feel like it has been 10 years at this point since he started the Antikythera mechanism build, but I could be wrong.

  • I think he took some time off to write up some academic contributions that he discovered as a result of working on the mechanism