At the risk of turning this blog into a “look what model kit I made this week” list… I got this curious thing for my birthday the other week:
It’s a model of a ‘Strandbeest’, which is a type of wind-propelled walking sculpture made by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. You can read more about his creations here. His ‘beests’ are massive and insanely complex, but this model kit reproduces a smaller version of one of them using the same principles.
Here’s what it looked like before assembly:
Everything looked clean and relatively simple; a nice departure from some other kits I have made recently.
Assembly was very quick. Each of the twelve legs have only 6 pieces that snapped together tightly with very little effort. The instructions are very clear, the pieces easy to remove from the runners and everything fits together perfectly. This is a very well engineered kit.
That’s a shot of the first two legs showing the crankshaft and drive-rod mechanism. It’s very clever how everything fits together and still has a very large range of movement.
That’s six legs attached. One half of the kit is complete!
And there’s the finished guy! In theory, when wind turns the fan propeller on the top, a gearing mechanism will turn the crank shaft and make it walk along. It’s complex but very simple mechanically, and it only took about an hour to assemble (with no glue or tools). But does it walk…?
Here’s the proof:
Not bad is it!
The actual rhino strandbeest was much bigger and could actually carry people inside. It weighed 3.2 tonnes, and is now a permanent (immobile) sculpture in a pond in Amsterdam. Here’s a photo that was taken the day it walked on an abandoned runway in the Netherlands:
As it turns out I actually received two (different) strandbeest kits for my birthday. I think the other one will patiently wait for a while 🙂