I am Francisco Silva. I work as an engineer on structures and lifting, and I never grew out of wanting to know what is actually going on inside things. This site is where that goes.
An explanation of a machine is usually a wall of text, or a video that will not pause at the exact moment you lost the thread. What helps is being able to hold the thing still, move it a degree at a time, and read the one sentence that belongs to that degree.
So that is what every page here is. One machine, drawn in cut-away, moving, with the explanation stepping along beside it. Let it run, drag the dial to go at your own pace, or tap a step to jump straight to it.
I am not a web developer. I build these with AI, and that is half the reason they exist at all — it is what makes a thing like this possible in the evenings, and I enjoy it.
But an animation that looks right and is wrong is worse than no animation, and AI is very good at producing exactly that. So the rule here is that the geometry comes first and the words come second. Every page is a working model rather than a picture: the piston follows real connecting-rod kinematics, valve lift is the drawn cam profile minus the clearance, the shape of a hanging pipe is solved for rather than asserted.
Where the text quotes a number, there is a table at the bottom of the page that works that number out again, in your browser, from the same geometry that draws the animation above it. Change the drawing and those numbers change with it. None of them is typed in by hand.
That table is the part I care most about, and it has earned its place: three times now it has shown me a mistake that the animation was quietly hiding.
Nothing here takes more than three minutes. If a machine does not fit in three minutes, it becomes two pages — that limit is the whole difference between this and the long essays that already exist.
And before a page is done: cover the text, look only at the drawing, and read the heading of the step. If the drawing on its own would not let you say that sentence, then something is missing from the drawing — not from the words. More than one page here has been rebuilt because of that question.
More offshore and subsea. It is the corner I know best, and the one with almost nothing written about it for someone outside the industry — how a pipe is laid, how a crane keeps a load still while the vessel moves under it, why a subsea pipeline needs somewhere to grow when it heats up. All of it built from first principles, the same way as everything else here.