Dave Ansell
sciansell.bsky.social
Dave Ansell
@sciansell.bsky.social
Mostly a creator of science exhibits and demos, but sometimes do science shows, teach PhD students to make things, made podcasts when it wasn't cool. Https://sciansell.co.uk
Just posted off a generator to a wind farm... Visitor centre. Though the design is actually based on a wind turbine design, though I took all the iron out of the design so the resistance to motion is less with no load, so the difference when you turn on a light is very very obvious.
November 10, 2025 at 8:59 PM
Our solder pot died, and we needed one before Monday.... Luckily I had a cartridge heater in a drawer, and we built a new one.
November 7, 2025 at 11:47 AM
A build a landscape exhibit we built for a wetland visitor centre.
youtu.be/FgBwrBJgCYY?...
Fairly straight forward but it could be applied to a lot of situations.
Build a landscape interactive exhibit
YouTube video by Dave Ansell (Sciansell)
youtu.be
August 3, 2025 at 8:45 AM
It was a pain to build because granular materials are hard, but here is our exhibit on why normal distributions mean a small change in temperature might have a big effect on the probability of extreme events.
youtu.be/8SYsT-k7ij0?...
Normal distributions and climate change exhibit
YouTube video by Dave Ansell (Sciansell)
youtu.be
July 16, 2025 at 8:52 AM
We made a surprisingly engaging exhibit to communicate the difference between types of plastics.
youtu.be/PcfUeHN03ok?...
Ordering Game Exhibit
YouTube video by Dave Ansell (Sciansell)
youtu.be
July 14, 2025 at 5:25 PM
An exhibit we built recently that lets you pretend to be in a heist film and lets you find out why a short password is a bad idea.
youtu.be/Ebw7R6gTtuw?...
Brute force safe cracking exhibit
YouTube video by Dave Ansell (Sciansell)
youtu.be
July 1, 2025 at 4:50 PM
I'll just cut a slot in this tube on the milling machine I thought... Somehow it involved CNCing 5 custom jig pieces and some other odds and ends....
June 2, 2025 at 6:24 PM
We made a Morse code exhibit that can be used by people who don't know Morse code, at the cost of a whole lot of LEDs, and somehow over a thousand lines of code.
youtu.be/MaQHN5bitLI?...
Easy to use Morse code museum exhibit
YouTube video by Dave Ansell (Sciansell)
youtu.be
May 12, 2025 at 5:33 PM
We worked out a way to more than double the number of light beams on our magnetic light wall exhibit, and make them brighter.
March 27, 2025 at 3:46 PM
A slightly odd piece of kit I built for Steve Mould, reflecting a Newton's cradle back again with a lever. It doesn't work too badly... Though you could probably do better with serious engineering.
youtu.be/kY2YeM5fNDw?...
The Lever Paradox
YouTube video by Steve Mould
youtu.be
January 24, 2025 at 2:01 AM
My bathtub has been immortalised in a @stevemould video about the Brennen torpedo. Though it did involve a huge amount of swearing at propeller designs.
I think it was such a pain because the propeller is running too shallow to be efficient.
youtu.be/qvtZIdSI1Yk?...
November 30, 2024 at 11:46 PM
I realised that almost by definition the more economically important a STEM subject is, the less interesting what researchers are doing will be too the general public.
Because if there is a lot of money involved researchers will be so far down a rabbit hole it will be about fractional improvement.
November 15, 2024 at 9:02 PM
Somehow even when I buy a tornado bottle connector it ends up in the lathe because
(a) modern bottles have a shorter thread which meant it leaked so I had to cut 3.2mm off each end.
(B) They made the hole too small so I had to drill that out anyway...
It works nicely now
November 10, 2024 at 5:29 PM
The senior destructive testing engineer has just spent 10mins guessing 2digit random codes, which is probably a good sign for the exhibit based on this.
November 4, 2024 at 7:22 PM
We have just finished a Scytale exhibit. A Greek means of encoding messages. Seemingly simple but there were definitely subtleties to the leather straps, and attaching bolts to the middle of a tube.
October 22, 2024 at 10:57 AM
I was wondering if Musk's going mad and wrecking Twitter was actually all a plot by big social media manager... This thought brought to you by me wondering if I could be bothered to post about what I have just made on 5 different social media sites.
October 17, 2024 at 10:18 PM
How am I seriously considering building a padlock just because noone sells the right kind that will let go off the key? This can't be sensible.
September 25, 2024 at 10:33 PM