Crafts « Robot Claw

Archive for the ‘Crafts’ Category

Fang Rock

Thursday, December 8th, 2022

I’ve been on a crafting bender recently, digging into my supply of unopened kits. Last weekend, it was time for this:

I got this guy several months back, and since I’d always said “I wish LEGO made a lighthouse” I’m happy they’ve made such a nice one.

Assembly was easy and fun, and it goes together literally from the ground up. The rocky base hides a combination power-supply and motor, which both powers and turns the lamp.

Oh and this is surely the simplest LEGO assembly step ever:

There’s loads of little details in this model that aren’t immediately obvious, such as a secret cave in the base that hides a pirates treasure chest (and the switch for the power), detachable walls/roof for play purposes or that the interior of the house is fully furnished complete with glowing wood stove:

As a child I would have loved playing with this set!

For the lamp LEGO created a fresnel lens element, which focuses the light from an led. It works very well, and in a darkened room the lightdoes produces a bright and somewhat directed beam.

All told it took me about five hours to build and as with many other recent LEGO kits I continue to be impressed by their skill at creating convincing – and in this case working! – models of real life structures. To have done it at minifigure scale is all the more impressive.

This joins the Medieval Blacksmith as one of my favourite LEGO sets of all time. I don’t think I’ll be disassembling this one any time soon 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Science, Toys | Comments Closed

Chocolate House

Sunday, December 4th, 2022

Kristin made this yesterday:

It’s not a gingerbread house, it’s a holiday chocolate cookie! But is this really a ‘cookie’?

Here’s what was in the box:

Immediately it was clear the quality of this product was leagues beyond the usual ‘make-your-own-gingerbread-house’, which was to be expected considering it cost several times as much!

The first step was to cement the pieces together using the icing. As you can see they all fit more or less seamlessly and it’s well supported by the base.

The icing is the longest step. It took her maybe 30 minutes to complete it. Since the icing is meant to be snow, it hardly matters – in fact looks better – if you go outside the lines a bit!

Then it’s time to decorate. In addition to the pieces enclosed she put a few gumballs on top of the chimney. Don’t the little golden pearls look good?

And here is the completed cookie! Doesn’t it look great?

We’re going to try to keep it around Christmas. Will it still be edible then? Will it even last that long? I guess we’ll find out! 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Food | 1 Comment »

LEGO Atari VCS

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:

It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.

An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.

It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:

The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:

Here’s some detail:

Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂

The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):

And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:

And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:

Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!

With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?

Posted in Crafts, Games, Miscellaneous, Models, Toys | Comments Closed

The Bonkers Picross Book

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

I bought this last time I was in NYC:

KLS and I both enjoy Picross puzzles, and even without opening it I knew I’d be buying it. Here’s what the cover says:

Summer 2022 Anime Feature?!? Fun, beautiful and easy to draw? Dream co-star feature?!? Sheep with presents??!?

This was my sort of book!

Picross is the puzzle where you fill in squares in a grid to make a picture according to the numbers along the edges of the rows and columns. If it says 4 that means 4 connected squares. 4 2 would mean an unconnected blocks of 4 and 2 along that line (or column). It’s fun 🙂

The book is loaded with puzzles – over a hundred – and they get difficult almost immediately. The above photo are all the ‘easy’ ones they have, and after these you dive right into this sort of madness:

The difficulty difference between the eggplant and whatever the above is is tremendous, and it would take a great deal of time to solve.

But this book has incentives for beating the puzzles! When you finish one you can answer the question next to it (which seems to usually be ‘identify this character’) and submit your answer to win a prize, some of which are very nice:

As befits an anime themed puzzle book, many of the prizes are for anime/game fans as well. Alas the submission for entry was September 19 (yesterday!) so it seems I’ll miss out.

If you’re some sort of Picross god and have no trouble with that 45 x 50 shown above, this book has you covered, since it even has several large fold-out puzzles including this lunacy:

That’s 60 x 200, or 120 times larger than the goat I did above. This would be a monumental achievement to complete. I wonder how long it will take me?

And if you’re just masochistic, the book even includes some (harder) colored picrosses, including this fold-out one:

Yes, it is as difficult as it looks.

Oh and if you’re wondering what these look like when finished, the book also includes the full solutions to the previous issue, which it seems was anime-themed as well:

Since I’ve done the easy 10 x 10 puzzles I’m moving on to a bigger challenge: a 45 x 50 one featuring characters from the Bastard!!! anime:

I’ll follow up if I ever manage to complete it 🙂

Posted in Art, Blog, Books, Crafts, Puzzles | Comments Closed

Let’s Make A Rubber Stamp!

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

I bought this in Australia:

I thought it was a rubber stamp making ‘kit’, but it’s actually just a piece of soft rubber (an ‘eraser’ perhaps, from the label) that can be used to cut a rubber stamp. Since it came with nothing else and since I lacked most of the required supplies (tracing paper, chisels) I would have to wing it.

I started small, by drawing my design right onto the surface. I planned on removing the excess rubber using just an exacto knife.

This proved to be much easier than I expected since the rubber is so soft. Soft enough it can be easily torn! I had to be careful lest the blade cut somewhere I didn’t want it to.