Watch This Guy Build The World's First Screw Bike With Wild 3D-Printed Wheels

What do you get when you have a mechanical engineer, inventor, roboticist, and general multi-hat-wearing DIY-er in a single person, and that person also has a YouTube channel? There might be more than one answer here, but in our particular case, you get a guy by the name of James Bruton. 

Over the time he's been making and posting videos to YouTube, he's tackled any number of projects. From recent ones like a walking Star Wars droid to an ongoing series of balancing robots, part of Bruton's magic as a video creator is in a) his building demonstrations and b) his explanations of how and why he's doing what he's doing.

Like any good creative, it's also clear that he learns and iterates future projects based on what he's figured out with previous ones. While it's clear that he's super knowledgeable, what that solid base of knowledge seems to do is allow him the freedom to play, experiment, and adjust if things don't work out precisely the way that he wants them to. It's a lot of fun to watch.

Sew buttons, as my grandma might have said. 

Nah, actually, the cool thing we're talking about today is this mega-bonkers screw bike that Bruton has built. Using a series of four mecanum wheels (more frequently seen on industrial machines and/or robots than just about anything else; click this link for a full video breakdown of how they work), it's essentially an omnidirectional bike. 

Two pairs of mecanum wheels are built and also positioned to move in opposition to one another, with belts driven off the four individual electric motors that occupy the level of the bike just above them in the frame. The resulting screw motion is what moves the bike around as Bruton (or anyone else) rides it.

But before we get to seeing the bike in action, first Bruton filmed how he built it. Much of the wheel componentry for each unit is 3D printed using multiple materials and processes. There's plywood used for the outer wheel, but other, hardier materials are used for both the wedges and the individual little wheels that all get mounted at 45-degree angles around the circumference of each bigger wheel. 

There are also multiple bearings to consider for each of those individual rollers, not to