We wanted to see inside things. So we started building them.
whatDstuff is two people who got tired of diagrams that freeze the one instant everything has already stopped moving. Every machine here is built from scratch and left running while you look at it — scrolling through one is the closest thing to actually taking it apart.
You already know these machines by feel: the fridge’s hum, the click a pen makes, the shudder a washing machine works itself into right before it spins. Almost nobody has seen what’s actually happening inside.
A cutaway photo won’t show you either — it’s frozen at the one moment everything already stopped. So each explainer here is a small machine of its own: built part by part from how the real thing works, running the whole time you’re on the page, ready to be dragged around and looked at from any angle.
- 93 machines built — and counting
- 0 parts imported — every gear tooth is math
- 2 people building this — meet them in the gears, below ↓
How one gets built
- Read the real thing — Service manuals, patents, teardown footage, spec sheets — whatever the manufacturer or the patent office actually wrote down. If a source disagrees with the story we wanted to tell, the story loses.
- Build every part — Geometry, material, tolerance: all of it written as code, none of it bought or downloaded. It’s the slower way to work, and it has one advantage: a part we can’t construct is a part we don’t actually understand yet.
- Light it like a product shot — Studio lighting, real metal and glass, filleted edges, a camera angle chosen for that exact step. If it still looks like a programmer’s demo, it isn’t done.
- Make it run without a seam — Every loop comes back to the exact pose it started from, so there’s no cut to hide. The moment a seam shows, it stops looking like a real machine and starts looking like a trick.
- Check the words against the picture — Last, someone reads the copy against the frame it’s sitting on. If a sentence says the piston is rising while it’s falling on screen, that counts as a bug.
What we won’t do
- Simplify it until it’s wrong — If the real mechanism is stranger than the tidy version, the strange one wins. Your fridge doesn’t make cold — it moves heat out of itself, which is why the back of it is warm.
- Import a single part — No stock models, no marketplace assets, not once. Everything you see was generated from a description of the real thing.
- Promise a surprise we can’t pay off — A hook has to open a real question the mechanism goes on to answer. Anything else is a headline with nothing behind it.
Go open one
There are 93 machines on the bench right now, and the list is only that short because nobody has asked for the rest yet. Search for the one you want even if it isn’t there. A search that comes up empty gets logged, and that log is what we build next.