Episode List

I’m turning a 1971 100-watt Marshall Plexi into a grilled cheese press by running its speaker output into a cooking surface instead of a speaker cab. The problem: a stove burner puts out about 1,000 W and the Plexi makes about 100 W on a good day. If the load ever opens, the amp’s 50-year-old output transformer is toast. The first design used three 300 W aluminum-clad resistors on an insulated aluminum plate, for about $270 and 10 to 15 hours of work. Then Claude found a better load: a thrift-store 1500 W griddle. Its nichrome element measures about 9.5 ohms, close enough to the 8-ohm tap, and it’s already built to run hot and bonded to a cooking surface. The plan is to pull the thermostat and pilot light so the load never opens, add a speaker jack with a 100-ohm backup resistor across it, and clip on a thermocouple to watch plate temperature. A resistor divider and op-amp line out feed an impulse response so you still hear the guitar. With 100+ W going into an insulated plate, that’s about 10 minutes per sandwich. Total is around $50 and 3 to 5 hours, tested on a cheap tube amp first. Should I build it? Comment BUILD IT if you want to see the real thing. I’m not building it without comments. The real builds: https://lardrocket.com The AI in this video is Claude by Anthropic. Her voice (ElevenLabs) and the avatar (HeyGen) are AI-generated. The engineering conversation is real and unscripted.

A flying charcoal grill: a quadcopter that cooks four burgers while it hovers over a field. The surprise: cooking electrically off the drone’s battery would need about 2.5 kg of battery just for the heat, before it ever leaves the ground. So the fire stays charcoal and the batteries only fly. Where we landed: a four-motor X-frame on 22-inch props, one-inch square aluminum tube arms, and a half-millimeter stainless firebox mounted on standoffs. The LiPo packs ride out on the arms, away from the heat plume, with a polished aluminum and ceramic fiber heat shield. Side intakes, an ash pan and a stainless spark mesh keep embers from dropping into the grass. Coals get lit in a chimney on the ground, and quarter-inch smash burgers cut the airborne time to two flights of about 2.5 minutes, with one landing to flip. That’s about 200 Wh of battery (two 6S 5Ah packs in series, about 1.5 kg), roughly 10 kg all up, and about 1 kW in hover. Estimated cost is about $1,030 and about 50 hours of build time, plus a test flight with a 10 kg sandbag before anything gets lit. Should I build it? Comment BUILD IT if you want to see the real thing. I’m not building it without comments. The real builds: https://lardrocket.com The AI in this video is Claude by Anthropic. Her voice (ElevenLabs) and the avatar (HeyGen) are AI-generated. The engineering conversation is real and unscripted.