Wonderfully Over-Engineered Kitchen Timer Makes Any Chef Look as Cool as Guy Fieri

Wonderfully Over-Engineered Kitchen Timer Makes Any Chef Look as Cool as Guy Fieri

It isn’t a fear of failure, or of accidentally giving dinner guests food poisoning, that keeps people from learning to cook. It’s obviously a lack of kitchen tools that make you feel like a futuristic anime hero wielding a cool-looking blaster. Well, one maker has solved that problem by creating the most wonderfully over-engineered kitchen timer we’ve ever seen.

Those of us brave enough to face our fears and actually make our own meals instead of relying on takeout have probably never stopped to think about how cool a kitchen timer could actually be. They’re usually either little wind-up contraptions that look like a cartoonish animal, a dumbed down calculator with an old school LCD screen, or whatever smart voice assistant can tell the difference between 15 minutes and 50 minutes. (Sorry, Siri, that’s not you.)

Few of us have ever thought that setting a timer could be the best part about prepping a meal, but now we know better, thanks to one talented artist and maker on YouTube who goes by VALiMA.

It took about a month for VALiMA to design, 3D print, and assemble all of the electronics that power this elaborate kitchen accessory. Inside is a hidden ratcheting mechanism that allows the blaster’s ‘barrel’ to rotate 360-degrees in one direction, and every time it completes a spin, a rotation sensor adds 60 seconds to the timer. The user can then start the timer by pulling the blaster’s trigger.

It’s a surprisingly elaborate creation given the device’s simple purpose, but the results look like a genuine anime or sci-fi movie prop with an impressive level of fit and finish. The only disappointing part is the quiet beep the timer makes when time runs out. I’d love to see a larger speaker in there with a better sound effect that makes time running out feel as dramatic and impressive as the rest of this build.


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