Tag Archives: Grasshopper

A hop, skip and spring-loaded jump

The expansion of Caleb Flutur‘s LEGO steampunk insect menagerie continues apace. This time, he has cooked us up a cracking grasshopper. This might be my favourite of his mechanical bugs so far! The gold highlights look great, without being too overbearing; ditto for the reddish-brown ‘wooden’ parts. The black sausages are a fine – if fragile – solution for the antennae. The elements that jump out to me, though, are the shock absorber and spring elements used for the hind legs. It’s such a good fit, yet somehow it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice of a part. It makes it look like this thing really could spring up at you!

Grasshopper

Springboard your adventure in this mechanical grasshopper

Hop around! Hop around! Hop up and up, and get down! In devising solutions for building robots, it’s sometimes best to start with examples found in nature. When Moko set out to build his latest LEGO mech, he looked to the springy grasshopper. Moko’s model is both an excellent representation of the insect and has just enough metallic bits to make it feel mechanical. Hopping power is provided by the legs’ robust hydraulic system, while the black pistol feet likely give it the ability to stick to nearly any surface.

Hopper