theme building

Self-described “Mr. Fix-It” Trent Whatley was tired of having to replace parts of his gas grill every year, so he decided to build a brand-new one out of a V8 engine from an old Chevy. First he spent about 15 hours painstakingly removing the guts from the engine with a plasma cutter and smoothing all the jagged edges. Then he sand-blasted it to remove rust and had it cleaned professionally at a machine shop.

That’s not a carnivorous blob escaped from a B-movie—it’s a musical instrument called the Slime-O-Tron II. When Brooklyn engineer Eric Singer isn’t building elegant, music-playing robots, he designs unconventional audio controllers that send digital signals, known as MIDI data, to music software, turning them into sounds. For his latest such invention (he built the original Slime-O-Tron last year), Singer cooked up some slime from a recipe he found online and infused it with graphite to make it conductive.