Ben Krasnow’s channel Applied Science has been the flagship channel of engineering and science YouTube for many years. In every video he explains some new and interesting piece of science and engineering he’s replicated in his shop. He’s made aerogel, a water jet cutter, a plasma sputtering chamber, an EDM drill, air bearings, an electroluminescent display, an LCD, and the source of his earliest publicity: a scanning electron microscope. He’s a truly prolific and incredible engineer who works with all kinds of electronics, machining, chemistry, physics and software. Every video leaves me in awe of him. Often he’ll be the first non-professional to try recreating something based on a procedure from papers and have to do dozens of failed experiments before making a video documenting the process and all the extra considerations. His videos and skill are incredible and I’ve learned a lot about the process of scientific lab work from watching them.

Clickspring is a channel about clockmaking, and watching it is wireheading on pure craftsmanship. I’ve never done any machining and don’t plan on ever making a clock, but his videos along with everything he makes in them are gorgeous examples of making everything with care and a commitment to excellence. This shows through in everything he does, from making custom screws with stunning blue oxide finish and hand-rounded interior ends that aren’t even visible when assembled to doing original research and building some authentic ancient tools for his reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism. He puts the same care into his videos as the work itself: the camera shots and lighting are beautiful, the machining operations are seamlessly sped up at the right times to fit in the video but show the key moments, and he often includes nice composited overlays of the CAD model on top of the raw stock so you can understand what he’s doing, and the narration, music and sounds of the machining are excellently done to give the videos a relaxing feel. Every Clickspring video is just a delightful experience to watch.

He also does videos without narration that just beatifully show all the machining and other work that goes into making something, this video being the most impressive example. He has a second channel called Clickspring Clips where he posts 2-4 minute non-narrated videos showing the making of one interesting part of his larger projects. His Patreon also has many exclusive videos once you watch all the public ones.

Stuff Made Here is the newest channel to enter S tier. When YouTube first recommended one of his videos to me 4 months ago the channel had just started with a few videos and I thought “huh how is this brand new channel getting hundreds of thousands of views”, then I watched the video and thought “okay wow, apparently if you make really excellent stuff from the start it can become popular on YouTube super fast”. He just makes really interesting and impressive videos where he uses his skill in many different disciplines of engineering to make cool stuff and then gives interesting descriptions of all the considerations, testing, engineering, fabrication and failures that went into making it.

For his most popular video he makes a basketball backboard that always directs the ball into the hoop. He designs and builds a custom mechanism to move the backboard to any distance and angle using rods that minimize the weight on the board so it can move quickly, describing the kinematic principles and how he constructed it using CNC plasma cut and spot welded sheet metal with 3D printed joints. Then he describes the clever custom algorithm for filtering out the basketball from other moving objects in the depth camera by fitting a ballistic curve to all possible object trajectories, as well as the software for extrapolating and calculating the required backboard position. The way he did everything is quite impressive and, like all his projects, he did it in only a few weeks while also having a day job.

What sets him apart from other YouTube makers is not only the skill in so many different areas that his projects display, but also the detailed explanations of the entire engineering process including the considerations, math, algorithms and failures rather than just the fabrication. If this sounds good to you, you should watch every single one of his videos including the ones that might not look that interesting. There’s not that many yet, but there might be soon since he somehow has also been managing to post more frequently than anyone else in my S tier (have I mentioned he also has a day job!?).

Captain Disillusion has been on YouTube for 12 years now, originally in obscurity but gradually growing to millions of viewers. He goes over trick and hoax viral videos and explains the visual effects used to make them. The thing that’s incredible is the production value: Costumes, makeup, well-written scripts, and a ridiculous density of impressive visual effects. Captain Disillusion is what happens when an incredibly talented and driven visual effects artist puts an entire month of full time work into every single 5 minute video. He’s done streams and time-lapses before of him spending dozens of hours on a 3 second visual effect for a throwaway gag.

A typical video consists of a well-written and edited intro of him introducing a faked video, doing a detailed breakdown of all the components of the effect but quickly thanks to amazing visual aid footage, then him just one-upping the original video by doing the effect so much better than anyone else has ever done it, without the tells he went over. Here’s some other, good ones but really every single one is excellent.

This is a weird and wonderful channel that to me really exemplifies what’s great about YouTube. Most videos are of the form “sharpest X kitchen knife in the world” with a thumbnail of a hand holding a weird knife in the same pose. Some examples of X are “Fungi”, “Paper”, “milk”, “Pasta”, “Underwear”, and “smoke”. I originally ignored suggested videos from this channel because I assumed they were some weird click-bait that didn’t really make a knife from those materials, and that was tragic because he really does and it’s amazing.

Every video has no talking or words except for occasional subtitles, and follows the process starting from the raw material, demonstrating all the processing steps required to make a hard substance out of it, casting a knife blank, sharpening it, and testing it. At some point early in the channel’s history someone must have commented that the videos were like ASMR videos because after that he got a high quality microphone and puts a lot of emphasis on the sounds.

The coolest part is he’s clearly really good at materials science and every video has amazing steps all done in his apartment. Lets take the “sharpest Seawater kitchen knife in the world” video as an example: It starts with a shot of him getting huge jugs of seawater from the ocean and collecting shells on the beach. At home he boils the seawater into salt and a solution he labels “magnesium chloride”. Then he puts a seashell on top of a charcoal briquette and puts it in an insulating firebrick box in his home microwave-oven-thing and cuts to it coming out totally calcified (apparently you can do that without a furnace??). He grinds it up with the subtitle “quicklime”, puts it in water and uses a thermal camera to show the exothermic reaction to get slaked lime. Cut to him combining a concentrated sea brine with the lime water to get “magnesium hydroxide + salt”. He adds water to dissolve the salt and filters out the magnesium hydroxide, combines it with the magnesium chloride from earlier, dries it, uses his handy durometer to show it fails a hardness test. He pops the magnesium hydroxide in his charcoal microwave furnace to get “magnesium oxide” and shows that this time when combined and dried it yields a very hard rock-like substance. Cut to him pouring a bunch of it in a rectangular plastic box, drying it and sawing out a knife shape. Then his famous sharpening sequence with increasingly fine knife stones, followed by the ever-present cucumber chopping test (complete with weird cucumber reveal out of godzilla-themed rubber gloves). He finishes by showing that the “magnesium cement” (Wiki link) doesn’t immediately dissolve in watera and that it can also be combined with dirt to make bricks.

I can’t see anything remotely like this every being green-lit as a TV series, but every video is brilliant and relaxing, they all get millions of views with zero advertising spend, because everyone likes them and recommends them to friends and algorithmic recommendations respond to that in a way that human TV producers wouldn’t have the guts to. People complain about the “YouTube algorithm”, but at this kind of thing it truly shines.