Anyone ever watch that Discovery Channel show Doing Da Vinci?

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/doing-davinci/doing-davinci.html

Aside from being stupid enough to create and promote a title that implied DOING Da Vinci, it's fairly fascinating. A university professor, and Leonardo Da Vinci specialist, assigns one of Davinci's finished or partially finished plans for an ancient machine or device to a team of diverse crafstmen and artisans and they try to produce a working copy from scratch using materials that might have been available in Da Vinci's time even if HE could never have gotten his hands on them.

So far I have seen this team produce interesting devices and weird devices and gruesomely fierce devices and machines based on Di Vinci's plans . . . and they all work.

That's what really fascinates me, the fact that if Di Vinci had been able to get his hands on the proper material and hire the correct craftsmen and artisans then he WOULD have been able to create actual working models of most of his inventions. The sad reality, though, is that Di Vinci's stuff nearly always failed during the testing phase because he was too far ahead of his time where materials were concerned.

Anyway, I enjoy watching as the professor assigns the team a challenge and their engineer translates Di Vinci's complete plans or vaguely sketched proposal into a set of working blue prints and then hands those over to the carpenters and machinists for implementation.

Oh, and some of the guys working on this stuff are themselves real characters!

How many episodes did they make or are they still making them?

Did they test more then one design in each episode? Did they do that bat like flying machine of his?

As far as I can tell they are still producing episodes. I think that they do only one machine per episode, but since Discovery is running thirty minute episodes back to back, it can get a little confusing in regards to what they designed and when.

Some other team, actually, tried the bat like flying team a couple of years ago in England and, yes, they managed to make it work. It was actually a glider plane and it DID fly with one very brave woman acting as the pilot. On the other hand, it did also darn near kill her as I recall.

The only failure in building a Leonardo Da Vinci machine that I am aware of is, again, when a group of Brits attempted to build a giant cross bow design of his and DID NOT follow his design plan closely enough but tried their own version of MODERN techniques and totally messed it up.