For some of those who are aficionados of the drink, tea making can be serious business. For them, strong, black, leaf tea left for ages to stew in a stained teapot that would strip the hairs off your chest (like it should be made) just won’t do. These beverage anarchists demand a preparation process of careful temperature regulation and timing, and for some reason repeatedly dunking a teabag in the water.

For them, [Dorian Damon] has an automated solution to getting the crucial dunking process right. He’s made an automatic tea bag dunker. The teabag is mounted on a slide operated by a crank, and the crank is driven through a pair of bicycle hubs. Motive power comes from a mains shaded-pole motor, an unusual bi-directional one of which he only uses one side. He measured his personal dunking rate at about 50 per minute, so he only needed a 4:1 reduction to match the motor at 200 RPM.

The resulting machine will happily dunk his tea bag at that rate for as long as it’s left switched on. He’s put a few videos up, of which we’ve posted one below the break.

If you need more than an automated cup of tea, how about a full breakfast?