A bunch of resourceful Russian teenagers who couldn’t afford to take a trip to the beach recently created an unusual indoor swimming pool right in the living room of their apartment. They just used bit of polyethylene film, packing tape, a lot of water, and voila – their carpeted lounge was converted into a fully functional water park.

The boys then posted pictures of their DIY pool online, which quickly went viral on several Russian social media websites. They can be seen swimming and lazing around in the water giving thumbs up signs to the camera. They seem to have covered all their furniture in plastic, including their mattress and radiator.

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30-year-old Ismail Mescioglu, a bus driver from Turkey, had always wanted to drive his very own truck, but he knew he could never afford to buy one. So he settled for the next best thing – to build one using discarded parts and scrap metal. Today, Ismail Mescioglu is the proud owner of a swanky street-legal red truck he named ‘IMES’

Ismail, a father-of-two from Turkey’s Tusba county, is the first person in Turkey to have built a large-size truck entirely on his own. He managed to complete the seemingly impossible project through sheer grit – he had no prior experience, no proper plan and no idea of how he was going to pull it off. “When I started the construction, everyone was taunting me,” he said. “Everyone was making fun of me.”

But Ismail was not one to give up. He started visiting scrap dealers and gathered as many parts as he could. He also bought an old Murat 131 car for the motor. For the body of the truck, he bought metal sheets and built the entire body of the vehicle himself. After several months of hard work, his patience finally paid off and the truck was ready. and the most impressive thing is it only cost him around $2,800.

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I’ve seen a lot of parents flatly refusing to indulge their kids’ outlandish ideas. That’s why I find 50-year-old Will Pemble’s spirit and child-like enthusiasm quite extraordinary. The father-of-two actually gave in to his son’s bizarre request – to build a rollercoaster in their own back yard.  It really makes Will a strong candidate for the title of best dad in the world, don’t you think?

Will is an e-commerce professional, living in San Francisco with his wife and two children (Lyle, 10 and Ellie, 12). He said that he took on the rollercoaster project because he wanted to show his kids that anything is possible if you’re willing to put in the effort. And he’s also a bit of a physics enthusiast, so he thought the project would be a great time to teach his children a fair bit of science.

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Whether you are perennially single or need to get some practice before that big date, this kissing pillow might be of great use to you. The ‘Make-Out Practice Pillow’ comes with a creepy built-in plastic nose and mouth, designed to give you the illusion of kissing a real person.

Florida-based designer Emily King created the pillow as a solution for inexperienced kisser. “When I was in middle school, everyone joked about making out with pillows for practice. I’m assuming that I was not the only one for whom the jokes had some truth,” she said.

26-year-old Emily said that she was inspired by CPR dummies and some removable rubber dummy mouths that she found in abandoned suitcases near her apartment. So she went and got herself a few ‘mouth pieces’. “The mouths sat in a bin in my studio for a while,” said the DIY-expert. “They whispered to me as I worked in my studio. ‘We are waiting,’ they said, ‘and we are creepy. Don’t you want to get us out of your studio?’ After many months the rubber lips exhaled the idea of make-out pillows. I’ve been avoiding the insistency of the mouths, but as we near closer to Valentine’s Day I know the time has come,” she wrote on DIY community website, Instructables.

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Mike Stock had always wanted to own a boat, but could never afford to buy one. 13 years ago he decided to build his own in the comfort of his backyard, using the skills he had acquired working as a cabinet maker in West Bountiful, Utah.

It was supposed to be a five-year project, but building the 35-foot-long boat took Mike longer than he anticipated. Part of the reason it took him so long was because he couldn’t heat the parts in order to apply glue and paint, so he didn’t work on it during the winter. The experienced cabinet maker says he built most of the vessel all by himself, at least all the wooden parts anyway, starting with the frame. That was his first task, and by far the most time consuming. Stock spent around 10 years building the frame upside down, and brought in a crane to flip it over when it was completed. He spent the last three years working on the topside, building the cabin and all the other rooms, and figures the boat will finally be ready for its maiden voyage by November. Believe it or not, Mike Stock didn’t have any kind of boat building experience, and built his massive three-floor boat by following a step-by-step plan he found online.

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It’s not going to make his house airborne, but Laurent Aigon’s home-made Boeing 737 cockpit is so realistic that the Institute of Aircraft Maintenance at Bordeaux-Merignac Airport asked him to give a lecture on his achievement, and an aircraft maintenance company contacted him about using his creation for simulations.

40-year-old Laurent Aigon, from Lacanau, France, has always had a thing for airplanes. He grew up in Beutre, just 200 meters from the Merignac Airport, where he used to spend most of his time watching planes land and take-off, daydreaming that one day he would be the one behind the yoke. At 12-years old he had his first plane-flying experience, in front of his computer screen, playing Flight Simulator, but he was just too lazy for school and never went on to become a real pilot. Still his childhood dream stuck with him, and one day he decided that if he couldn’t fly a real plane, he was going to fly a fake one, right in the comfort of his own home. Five years ago, he met Jean-Paul Dupuy, a like-minded aircraft enthusiast, and together they set out to build the most realistic simulation cockpit possible. They met with the people of Aquitaine Simulation, and got s glimpse of their Airbus flight simulator. Confident they could build their own functional cockpit, Laurent and Jean-Paul scoured the internet for parts, and piece by piece, module by module, they managed to put together one of the world’s most realistic Boeing 737 cockpits. The fact that it’s crammed between a closet and a bunk-bed in a children’s bedroom is of little importance.

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The Star Wars universe has millions of fans throughout the world, and some of them really invest a lot of time and money into their passion for the franchise. Case in point, a group of German Star Wars enthusiasts who created an almost life-size model of the iconic Tie Fighter spacecraft out of wood, steel and plastic.

It took an army of hobbyists two years to complete, but the 1:2 scale Tie Fighter recently unveiled in Eichenzell, Germany, is a true DIY masterpiece. 20 Star Wars fans of different professions, from financial brokers to policemen and architects, put their blood and tears into this 5.30 m wide, 4.80 m long, 4.30 m high and 1.4 tons heavy model of the Galactic Empire’s starfighter. They worked in 12-meter-wide parking garage and spent an estimated €14,000 ($18,500) on necessary materials. The steel and aluminum frame alone cost €6,000 ($8,000), the wood was mostly provided for free, and the giant plastic ball that makes up the cockpit cost €1,900 ($2,500). Luckily, they had a couple of generous sponsors who took care of the bills.

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Istvan Puskas, a wood crafting enthusiast from Tiszaörs, Hungary, has recently finished work on a unique vehicle that has a wine barrel fuel tank and the suspension and gear box made from wood.

The 51-year-old has always had a passion for creating extraordinary things out of wood. In fact, just last year we featured another one of his amazing inventions – a one-of-a-kind chopper made almost exclusively out of wood. Now, the crafty agricultural machine expert has decided to one-up himself by building a working car from the same unusual material. Encouraged by his wife, Iron, Istvan Puskas used the long winter break from working in the Great Hungarian Plains to design and build his wooden vehicle. “I started to work on it at Christmas and it took me four months to finish it. This kept me busy during the winter time,” he says. “My aim was to make it out of wood as much as possible. A wooden car must be made from wood!” And apart from the Polish-made Fiat 126 engine, the tires, and a few other necessary parts, Puskas only relied on timber for his build. The frame, wheels, axles, gearbox and gas tank are all made out of wood.

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Tao Xiangli, a 37-year-old inventor from Beijing, China, has spent over 150,000 yuan ($25,000) and more than 11 months building a functional robot made of scrap parts and wires bought from second-hand markets.

In China, Tao Xiangli is known as a DIY genius, with a collection of amazing home-made creations under his belt. Three years ago, he made headlines in international media after building a submarine all by himself, and today he’s back to with another impressive achievement – a 496lb (225kg) robot he pieced together in his small Beijing apartment. “He’s ugly, but he’s kind of awesome,” Tao said about the  2.1-meter-tall metal behemoth  that can apparently perform simple movements and even mimic human actions by using infrared rays. It can turn its neck, raise its legs and even shake hands at the flick of a switch on the board located on its back. Instead of crating a humanoid casing for his robot, Tao Xiangli decided to leave it “naked”so viewers could see every one of the over 110 scrap parts and 3,000 lengths of wiring required to make it work. To make it easier on the eyes, the young Chinese inventor fitted his robots with strips of bright neon cabling.

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Thor’s hammer is one of the coolest weapons in the superhero universe. Called Mjolnir, it can summon lightning, crush through pretty much anything and help the Norse god fly. No wonder Caleb from Hack A Day wanted one for himself.

But the gifted builder wasn’t looking for yet another simple prop that looked like Thor’s hammer, he wanted something that actually produced bolts of lightning. Armed with his own DIY superpowers, Caleb Kraft set out to create a foam replica of Mjolnir and sought the help of battery-powered Tesla coil maker Staci Elan, who provided a tiny but effective device able to produce 80,000 volts of electricity. Caleb says he had to make a choice: “I was either going to go portable and live with small arcs, or make this a stationary piece and hide a giant Tesla coil in a base. It would have bigger arcs, but I couldn’t carry it around.” In the end, he opted for the portable version, fitting his light but realistic looking hammer with a a small 12v powered coil. It creates 3″ arcs when going to another piece of metal, and can power on light bulbs if you hold them close to the hammer. Nowhere near as cool as the real Thor’s powers, but pretty awesome for a mere mortal, wouldn’t you say?

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A passionate Iron Man fan from the United Kingdom spent hundreds of hours creating a realistic-looking suit of the Marvel superhero from Eva foam, wood and other recycled items. Did I mention he’s only 17?

Reddit user Mafferick was so impressed with his 17-year-old friend’s home-made Iron Man costume that he decided to share it with the community. DIY fans obviously had a lot of questions about the materials he used and the time he spent working on it, so he gave the young creator the chance to reply via his account. It turns out the guy is a big fan or Iron Man, and he also likes making stuff, so this awesome wearable suit is a combination of two of his greatest passions. He used “lots and lots of foam, wood and various recycled bits and bobs (the boots are some old shoes with the cushions from some old roller blades to make them wearable)”, and spent “a few weeks if you add the hours together” sculpting all the various parts and making them look as realistic as possible. The rudimentary tools used to make this impressive piece of equipment include an industrial knife, a dremel, sandpaper and over 100 extra sharp blades for cutting the Eva foam. He painted the whole thing with automotive spray paint and now plans to give it a “damaged” effect. The price tag – around $540 worth of materials and a great deal of time.

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A man from Jinan, China’s Shandong Province, has spent six months building a Transformer-like robot that morphs into a functional car, at the push of a button. If you’re expecting a real-life Bumblebee, you’re going to be disappointed…

But finally, right!?! A real transformer and it’s not some guy in a suit either. Frankly, I was getting a bit tired of seeing people build all these awesome looking Transformer replicas that didn’t do anything but look pretty, and I was really hoping someone would one day take it to the next level. Enter unknown Chinese Transformers fan with a passion for DIY stuff. According to RocketNews24, the man has wanted to build his very own Transformer ever since watching the first film in Michael Mann’s trilogy, four years ago. He didn’t have any kind of mechanical or electronics knowledge but that didn’t stop him from finally accomplishing his dream. It took the Jinan-native six months and 70,000 yuan (US$11,000) to finally complete his life-size Transformer, but just look at it…

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Sun Jifa, a Chinese farmer who lost both his arms after a homemade bomb exploded prematurely, built his own functional prosthetic limbs after he couldn’t afford to buy the one offerd by the hospital.

A few years back, 51-year-old Sun Jifa, from Guanmashan, Jilin province, northern China, was working on explosives designed for blast fishing when a bomb blew up prematurely leaving him without both his arms. He was taken to the hospital and treated, but when doctors proposed he wear a pair of prosthetics designed to make his everyday life easier, Sun realized he just couldn’t afford them. At the same time he knew he needed both his arms in order to work on the farm and provide for  his family. That’s when he decided to built his own artificial arms out of scrap metal. After eight years of planning and several prototypes, He finally has a pair of functional arms.

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This is one of the most unbelievable stories I have come across in a while, and had my doubts about its authenticity at first, but after reading about it on some reputed websites, my worries were put to rest.

The story was recently made public by Reddit user ‘Naruhodo‘, who linked to a bunch of photos of a Mad-Max-style motorcycle apparently built out of the parts of a broken-down Citroen 2CV, by a man stranded in the Sahara Desert. Pretty unbelievable stuff, only it turned out to be absolutely 100% true. It all happened back in 1993, when Frenchman Emile Leray was on a solo trip in Northern Africa, driving his specially prepared Citroen 2CV. His car broke down in the middle of the desert, tens of kilometers from the nearest settlement. To survive, the French MacGyver created a motorcycle out of parts of his broken down car.

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In a world where Internet and Smartphone app startup companies are a dime-a-dozen, it’s not every day that you see a startup that makes submarines. And definitely not one that is run by one man, from his basement. Yet, that’s exactly what 37-year-old Zhang Wuyi has been doing after he was laid off from his job in a textile machine factory.

Wuyi, from China’s Hubei province, builds mini submarines in a makeshift workspace in the basement of a disused building. When he started off, he worked alone. Today, he has three orders under his belt and also employs ten workers. His submarine models are capable of diving up to 30 meters under sea level and travel at 20 kmph for 10 hours. They can seat two people and also contain oxygen tanks and video cameras. The walls are made of wrought iron. It takes Wuyi up to a month to build a submarine, and each one sells for about $31,000.

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