Is there anything worse than when people figure out how to do something clever, but no one bothers to write the process down? It drives me nuts that we'll never really know how they built the Pyramids, for instance. I mean we know it was built by aliens, sure, but we don't know how they did it.

A fellow named Kurt Nordwall, who works at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, also encountered something that no "How It's Made" YouTube video exists of. Not pyramids, but something more recent: Elaborate 18th-Century frames housing the Dutch paintings in the MIA collection. As the resident framing technician, Nordwall spent a lot of time studying the elaborate woodwork, and became consumed with how these could have possibly been constructed prior to the Industrial Revolution.

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A little research led him to this diagram of a frame-carving machine.

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With no CG animation showing him how it worked, Nordwall began sketching, trying to figure out how it did what it did.

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Eventually, and with grant backing from the Roberta Mann Innovation Award, Nordwall was able to construct a hand-powered machine that he can feed the raw frames into to produce different carvings. Check this out:

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Next step: Getting Nordwall to Egypt.