Crank up

Let's crank up the old motorcycle and take it for a spin.

I kept thinking: this has nothing to do with my interests, with what I believe is a desirable subject for literature. I was doing it as a performance. I kept cranking myself up to perform, to meet the demands of the genre. I know this sounds terribly inartistic.

He cranked up the volume to 11.

And it was not until Ryan Shawcross's towering header was cleared off the line by Danny Murphy on the stroke of half-time that Stoke started to crank up the pressure and suggest they were capable of getting back into the match.

Was the great machine ever what it was cranked up to be?

Let's hope your ol' buddy Majors is all he's cranked up to be, for we're about to introduce him to what you yanks refer to as hard ball.

That whole campaign was a damp squib, they cranked it up as a real possibility that Scotland might win, and when we actually got there it didn't happen like that, and everybody came home quite early with their tails between their legs.