Alex Apollonov Takes on His Fans Most Dangerous Build Ideas

There is always this lull in productivity before, during, and after the holidays. Folks are still hungover from all that holiday spirit, and it might take some time before something cool gets made this year.

Even Alex Apollonov of I Did A Thing was out of ideas at the end of 2021. But taking an unpaid break from YouTube doesn’t pay for Christmas presents, so he did what any self-respecting content creator would do – he took ideas from his fans and made them his own.

These ideas come from fans who don’t have the technical knowledge or budget Alex has. They just want to see him build weird stuff.

And that’s okay! I mean, who else would be crazy enough to make something like a treadmill belt sander?

Treadmill Belt Sander

This project was easy enough; Alex just swapped the running belt of an old treadmill and replaced it with a custom-fit roll of sandpaper. Though it works wonders as a belt sander (the multiple speeds allow for different levels of sanding), it doesn’t work as a treadmill.

The sandpaper has way too much grip for any average person to run on it. Even though Alex ran on the treadmill with his feet, doing the same thing with footwear will just whittle away the bottoms. All in all, this was a good project which fulfilled at least one of its intended functions!

Hotdog Glow Stick

Another project idea seemed promising – a packed emergency hotdog that heats up when you snap it like a glow stick. But as soon as Alex factored in things like chemicals and packaging, it was clear why this never hit the market.

For a glow stick to glow, chemical reactions between hydrogen peroxide and tertbutyl alcohol must occur. Snapping a glow stick opens up a vial of hydrogen peroxide, causing the two liquids to mix.

The bad thing is most, if not all, liquids that cause heated chemical reactions are poisonous. So mixing something like sodium hydroxide with water to cook a hotdog may not be the smartest thing to do. Even though the hotdog gets heated, it doesn’t taste very good.

Ankle Hopper Lawnmower

While you may not know the toy’s name, I’m sure everyone has seen those ankle hoppers you attach to one leg and hop with the other. The mass-marketed version is a safe children’s toy, but one of Alex’s fans decided it would be good to take the round part off and replace it with a blade, turning it into a makeshift lawnmower.

This was another easy build for Alex, seeing as he took a kitchen knife and strapped it to the ankle toy. The execution, though, was a bit harder. You would have to hop fast enough and keep the blade at the same height for it to cut a patch of grass effectively. You could use it to perfect your ankle hopping skills, though, as one mistake could mean a trip to the hospital.

The Chewing Machine

Chewing machines have been done before, but most of them try to mimic the look of an actual person’s mouth and teeth. It looks really gross. Alex’s version uses something more machine-like: a blender.

By cutting a hole in a blender and attaching a feeding tube, Alex could feed food into the blender and pass it directly into his mouth for easy ingestion. He secured the blender to a bike helmet, put it on, and started feeding yogurt ingredients into it.

It worked, but not that well. You can clearly see the yogurt had a hard time going down the tube and into Alex’s mouth. Not only that but having a blender turned on atop his head gave Alex a splitting headache.

So that was how Alex Apollonov spent his final month of 2021: recovering from his fan’s bad ideas in hopes that he entertained them. And that he did.

You can find more of his videos on his YouTube channel, I Did A Thing. Hopefully, the holiday break will have provided him with fresh ideas for this year because I doubt he could survive another round of these fanmade projects.

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