A budding gearhead is building a functional, V8-powered hot rod model all by himself — which is impressive on its own — and he’s building the thing mostly out of wood! That means cutting, sanding, gluing, and sanding some more. The model appeared on Reddit, and it leads to the carpenter’s YT channel.
The YouTube channel is called Generic Woodworking, but the work on display is nothing short of incredible. There’s a working wooden motor, a clutch, a speedometer and even a gearbox. It’s all great stuff! I mean, just look at this functional wooden model of a V8 engine, which powers the model hot rod:
The young gearhead is not only making his own parts and then building this whole damn thing, but he’s designing the parts using computer-aided design software, SketchUp.
I also want to point out that when I refer to the carpenter as young, I’m talking young as in high school-age. I had to scrub the video back — which is the equivalent of a doing a double take when perusing YouTube — when he mentions the project had been delayed by high school finals.
The video above breaks down the construction of the wooden engine, from making the stencils to the cutting, grinding and a cool overview of the pieces, which number 300 in all, before final assembly.
The engine is powered by an old electric drill, which this gearhead disassembled and repurposed for this project. Technically, that makes this hot rod an EV, but if this were actually an internal combustion motor, it would probably burn up. There’s too much cool stuff here (a supercharger intake!) to charr up, so we’ll definitely give this hybrid project a pass.
My favorite part of the video footage is probably the timing chain construction. There are 160 links in the chain and each one of these had to be painstakingly cut and sanded before the rope-like chain was assembled. Once more, out of wood!
I get super excited when I successfully assemble an IKEA Kallax, which is basically a rectangle, so I can’t begin to imagine how it must feel to design, cut, and assemble something like this working, wooden hot rod and engine model.
