Libyan rebels fix old weapons and invent new ones at their makeshift armouries on the outskirts of Misrata.
If any future museum showcases the way rebels beat the regime in Libya, the exhibits will likely include homemade weapons that look like props from a Mad Max movie: a shotgun fashioned from a steel pipe; a troop carrier built from scratch; a pickup truck groaning under the weight of an antique anti-aircraft gun.
Some of the strange creations in the rebel weapons factories seem almost fanciful, like they're designed more for intimidation than their practical use in a civil war now dragging into its seventh month.
But the pace of innovation in the garages and machine shops in rebel territory has become a serious factor on the battlefield, rebels say, as these bizarre new devices help them slowly take ground from the more conventionally equipped troops of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi.
"We had nothing at the beginning, just hunting rifles," said Muhsin Arayfa, 25, a former truck driver whose tinkering has made him one of Misrata's most celebrated weapons technicians.
He paused as his colleagues tested a gun they had stripped off an old Russian fighter jet and welded to a truck; the cavernous workshop filled with the roar of bullets the size of a man's thumb erupting from a muzzle at a rate of 2,200 per minute.
"Now we have better things," Mr. Arayfa said, with a wicked grin.
The start of the revolution was a time of bloody knuckles, when youths attacked troops with sticks, rocks and bare fists. Thousands of people died, and major cities such as Misrata suffered occupation with tanks in the streets and snipers on the rooftops. It's often assumed that NATO air power alone shifted the battlefield in favour of the rebellion, but jets cannot strike urban areas without risking civilians deaths, and the dense landscape makes it hard to find targets.
Rebels claim that the real shift in fortunes happened as they became more inventive. They soaked carpets with gasoline and placed them in the road, then waited until they got tangled in the wheels of the regime tanks and hurled Molotov cocktails to set them ablaze. Somebody took a Turkish starter's pistol and drilled out the bore, removed the plastic cores from the blanks and packed new bullets with lead and powder – slowly, painstakingly, creating a homemade 9-millimetre pistol.
One of the most famous inventions from those initial weeks was a fully armoured Chinese pickup truck. The only chinks in its steel plating were two horizontal slits in the windshield to allow the driver a limited view of the road. Rebels used the lumbering behemoth for rescue missions, evacuating apartment blocks that had fallen within range of snipers.
Brave volunteers would drive the armoured truck to the door of a building and race inside to grab women and children, loading them into a boxy compartment mounted on the back of the vehicle. Ten drivers were shot dead during those missions, rebels say, but the deaths always happened when the drivers were standing outside the vehicle; the armour itself was never defeated.
That slow-moving vehicle was retired as the fighting moved into the rolling dunes around Misrata, and then into neighbouring towns. Now, the rebels' weapon of choice appears to be pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the rear, often protected with sheets of steel plating. Many have heavy steel prows mounted on their front grilles, which offer protection and also serve as battering rams.
This deadly innovation has limits, however. Unlike insurgents in many parts of the Arab world, the rebels in a Misrata workshop say they would never dream of building a truck bomb. They seem wary of the forces that could be unleashed in their country, and consider anything but a frontal attack a dishonourable kind of warfare.
A rebel mechanic who identified himself only as Mohammed Mohammed, 50, a former purchasing agent, said he will help the rebels strip down their battle wagons after the war and convert them back into civilian vehicles.
"We will use these things only for hunting in the desert, God willing," he said.