The Gadget Brothers
Mike and Dan Dubno are master tinkerers whose innovations have altered global finance and television news. But their greatest creation is Gadgetoff—a madcap festival where science and technology's biggest names gather to flaunt prototypes, blow stuff up, and peer straight into the future.
POPULAR MECHANICS / DEC 2014
A dozen years ago, when Mike Dubno was looking for a home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a realtor showed him a six-story brownstone on a serene cross street not far from Central Park. The building was nice enough, but what really seduced Dubno was something the engineering inspector mentioned. He noted that a previous owner had divided the building into multifamily dwellings, and in so doing had installed 400-amp electrical service. "You know," the engineer said, "you could run a machine shop in here."
One of Dubno's priorities after moving in was to excavate a half-million pounds of bedrock in order to convert his dim, 19th-century grotto of a basement into a 900-square-foot workshop roughly the size and shape of a railroad apartment. Dubno then installed a Smithy lathe and milling machine he would control by a computer he built from scratch. He has a Jet drill press capable of 5,000 rpm, which he concedes is "a ludicrous drill press for an individual to have." He has an Epilog laser cutter and a MakerBot 3D printer. He has a TIG welder and a MIG welder and a Hypertherm torch with a 55,000-degree-Fahrenheit beam of ionized plasma. An industrial-grade air-filtration system with a 1-micron filter sucks stuff—the superfine particulate dust that results from matter that's been cut by a plasma torch, say—out of the air. When he fires up the Oneida vacuum that powers the system ("This is overkill … by a lot"), it emits a rising, multipitched whoosh not unlike the sound effect used for death rays in B movies.
On the room's several benches are motherboards in varying stages of deconstruction, a Short Circuit–esque robot Dubno built three decades ago when he was about 20, powerful magnets that if not stored properly will suck large metal things across the room, a length of copper pipe to be used in a magic trick (Dubno sometimes helps his friend, the magician Michael Chaut, build devices for shows), and an Antikythera mechanism—an ancient Greek device sometimes called humanity's first computer. Dubno fashioned one of the only accurate working models in existence out of Lucite using his laser cutter...