Small and Strange

It’s been a while! I should post more here. 

Here’s a little wooden DaVinci copter we made. It wasn’t the simplest to put together, and all the pieces were a little warped to getting it to run smoothly was a challenge. But I guess I never expected it to actually take off so it’s okay.

You can get the kit here although don’t be fooled by the picture, whoever put that one together stained the pieces a nice color first. It comes in plain unfinished wood.

This was probably the project that set me on this never ending journey to put together fiddly bits on the floor of my apartment. It’s a Strandbeest, a kinetic sculpture that came out of the brain of a guy named Theo Jansen. He’s a weird dude, and these are weird things. Here’s a video of a full sized Stranbeest moving around on the beach.

I have neither a beach, nor a giant workshop to assemble something that big so my Strandbeest is much, much smaller. 

Here’s what the final product looks like. The little army man is for scale, and companionship.

And it really does move! Here’s a little video we took. 

Adam Savage of Mythbusters actually put this kit together as well (after I did, so he clearly stole my idea) and he’s much funnier than I am so you can watch him do it here:

>> You can get a 3D printed Strandbeest kit from Theo’s site, but they’re really expensive. I went for the much cheaper version, which you can find here. << 

Let’s start with a trip to Mars! 

Every so often, Lego lets its fans design & nominate new kits. This Lego Mars rover is the fifth one of them (following Shinkai, the Hayabusa asteroid exploration spacecraft, Minecraft, and the DeLorean from Back to the Future). Being the nerd that I am, I actually pre-ordered this kit and was super duper excited when it came in the mail. I even took a picture of it:

The whole thing took us about an hour to put together. It has a good number of fiddly bits, but the end product is extra awesome because it has a sweet suspension system that allows me to drive it over the tops of my books and pretend they’re mountains.

Fun fact: this Lego model was created and suggested by a guy named Stephen Pakbaz, who actually worked on the real Curiosity. The one on Mars right now. 

>> You can get a rover of your own here. And you can see other Lego Cusoo projects—the ones that fans design and vote on—here on their website. <<

I’m Rose and I like to make weird little things. I thought maybe other people might like to do that too. So here’s where I’ll record my various projects, review how they went and tell you where you can get them if you’d like to play along. We’ll talk about paper automata, doughnuts, dinosaur models, Lego and more. 

Come make small and strange projects with me.