This week on the channel +163K views this week

Breaking Taps puts Webb's mirror mechanics into a working replica

The scale model demonstrates how one motor handles both coarse positioning and fine alignment.

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Breaking Taps Story of November 6, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.

JWST Mirror Actuator

Nothing new, plenty to explore. Breaking Taps posted no uploads this week, but its working replica of a James Webb Space Telescope mirror actuator offers a particularly hands-on reason to revisit the channel.

In "JWST Mirror Actuator," the creator holds up a gold hexagonal mirror-segment replica and demonstrates the movements needed to line it up. Then comes the ingenious mechanical part: a single stepper motor serves both coarse positioning and fine adjustment. Gears, a cam and a flexure mechanism turn an intimidating precision-engineering problem into something he can demonstrate on a physical model, with CAD views helping explain what moves inside.

The Short is currently the channel's busiest upload by daily views. Among the longer projects, "Designing Silicon From Scratch," the homemade microprocessor video we covered here earlier, has passed half a million views. The much older "I made a liquid metal electric thruster" is also adding views, keeping space hardware and homemade silicon together on the channel's active shelf.

Overall, the archive collected roughly 163,000 views over the week. Subscribers were unchanged, and daily viewing is currently well below the channel's usual level. Nearby in the science group, Simon Clark is close to his usual daily viewing, while Ziroth is having a markedly busier day than normal. For Breaking Taps, the fresh point of interest is a small mechanism explaining how an enormous telescope gets its mirrors into position.

Published on Trari