Every Friday I pick a random product on Instagram, I disassemble it, examine it and make a stop motion story with its parts. Every week the result is completely different and unexpected.

Here I share how it all comes about!

This week I opened a Date! It’s Ramadan, the Islamic fasting month and there are dates everywhere! I make sure to eat a few every now and then throughout the night. But I always feel so bad when I throw away the pits!

Seeds are fascinating! It doesn’t matter how many fruits I will gobble down, I will never wrap my brains around how this lil thing with some water becomes a tree! And this tree bears fruits with more seeds that can become trees! It’s mind blowing!

I always wonder what else can we do with seeds and if there is a way to save them and reuse them.

I started reading more about seed saving, and found out that it’s actually a thing! Farmers used to do it and it is still practiced on a personal scale nowadays, so you can do this if you have a garden. But on a wider scale, it’s very hard to maintain the quality of the seeds, it usually takes years to grow a tree from a seed, then there is also the gender of some plants issue. It even became illegal to save seeds in some places, where a patent seed of another would be saved a regrown! Something of that sort..

I also found that there are other uses for date pits, it’s fed to animals, they extract oils from them and they make coffeeee! I am more of a tea person, but that would be pretty cool to try!

A friend told me he had it once here in Egypt in Fayoum and it did actually taste similar to coffee! The pit does look like a coffee bean, but am a bit skeptical! But that would be awesome if it was true, the pit itself has tons of nutrients in it and no Caffeine! Here is a video of a guy who tried to make Date Coffee, it was a failed attempt though

I used my dremel to engrave different pits to make the illusion of the liquid spilling in my video. This is a stop motion technique where you make many instances of an object and then replace it with the consequent one in every frame so that it would appear to move when compiled. I think it's called 'replacement' technique, I am not sure! I rarely get to do this one because I only have one copy of the objects I dismantle, but I prefer it the most, I guess because it involves more making! I find it very hard to place my hands in the exact same place everytime, especially when I am photographing myself. Any tips?

I used the saw blade first but it wouldn’t cut properly, I thought it would be more like wood, I honestly didn’t expect it to look like this when I cut it in half. It’s a lot faster to saw it with a jagged handsaw. I first took a video of myself pouring liquid from a glass to another as a reference, then I completely ignored it after I started engraving the pits and realised that there is no way am gonna get a detailed water movement from this.

It kinda feels like a nutmeg to me, like we could grate it and put it on our food. But am no expert, you saw how I’d make coffee! haha

I created a youtube playlist for all the tinker videos I watch to learn new things every week! So nerds like me who like learning can explore this in their free time.

That's it for this week! Stay tuned for this week's Tinker Product and follow along on Instagram (if you aren't already) Don't forget to subscribe to The Tinker Mail!