At school there was always one person in the studio who was faster than everyone else. They blazed through projects with a marker, a Dremel or a coping saw so quickly that it was fun to watch, and you were in awe of their muscle memory.
And that’s the key: Muscle memory. Put in the hours, do something enough times and you can get fast at just about anything. It’s even more impressive when you’re wielding a tool most people have no experience with, like a motorized road line marker. Watch this road worker in Italy lay down lines and edges, including curved ones, with Ferrari-like speed:
I’ve seen self-propelled road marking machines, and riding-mower-style models with a seat, but I’d never seen this chariot variety before. I wonder if the operator hacked it together and/or modified it; you reckon it came out of the factory that fast?
The operator’s name, by the way, is Indrit Mema. He owns his own road-marking company, Segnalgrafica, in Cosio Valtellino in northern Italy. To give you a sense of how fast he’s moving in the video above, take a look at one of Segnalgrafica’s videos showing what looks to be a member of their JV squad:
I did manage to get a better look at Mema’s rig in this video. The chariot doesn’t look like a stock piece of equipment:
I freeze-framed it to get a look at the logo on the machine, but whomever graphic-designed this thing ought to be fired. What the hell does this look like it says to you?
“Somo?” “Spamc?” “Sscmo?” I was not able to find the company that produces this machine. The orange color of it is the same as that used by German manufacturer Hoffman’s road marking machines, but I couldn’t find a model like this anywhere on their site.
Whether he purchased the machine as-is or hacked it up himself, Mema apparently has fun doing his job. As he told Italian periodical Corriere Della Sera, “Quando traccio le strisce bianche mi sento come quando ero un bimbo sui go kart.” (“When I paint the white stripes, I feel like when I was a kid on a go kart.”)
http://www.core77.com/posts/49071/Fast-Work-Italian-Boss-on-Motorized-Contraption-Sprays-Road-Markings-With-Blazing-Speed-and-Accuracy