There’s nothing we love more than geeking out on feats of engineering. So when we came across this mind-blowing marvel online, we just had to share it.
It’s what’s believed to be the smallest fully functioning W32 engine in the world. Assembled from scratch and built to precise scale by a retired Spanish naval mechanic named José Manuel Hermo Barreiro, this tiny monster of epic beauty runs on compressed air and boasts 850 pieces, 650 screws and took Barreiro 2,520 hours to complete. The crankshaft alone could fit in your palm.
Barreiro, who has been impressing modelers and gear heads on the Internet for years with his small-scale precision engines (including the world’s smallest V-12), uses nothing more than pencil, ruler and graph paper to construct his blueprints before hand-crafting each piece.
Watch its mini-pistons pump away. The engine runs so smoothly, you can balance four coins on it (Yup, minute 1:10)
We’ve officially reached engine nirvana.