Junkyard Wars

This was a such great show on TLC. It is strictly nerd porn. If you have a love of rainbows and unicorns, you'd be better off skipping this. This is for people who love fighting robots or fixing cars. Each show has 2 separate teams competing to build a contraption from parts they find in a "Junkyard" within 2 days, and then use their creation in some sort of competition.

I especially liked the animation they use to explain the physics and mechanics of the teams design as they try to built their machines. It does get repetitive since there was only so many different challenges before it gets derivative. It ran from 2001 to 2004.