Tag Archives: wind-up

Keep building LEGO toys, who knows where you’ll wind up

Few builders in the LEGO community are as prolific and full of surprises as Australian artist Shannon Sproule, whose work we’ve admired since the site’s early years. During the fall of this year, Shannon focused on building “Z-Bots” – retro robots in bright colors inspired by the toy line of the early ’90s, many of which were donated to the Creations for Charity auction. For his latest build, Shannon sticks with the retro robots while bringing in a Zoids-inspired wind-up look for a new type of toy he calls the Strydor.

Click to see more of Shannon’s playful robot walkers

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Unwind your day with a wind-up penguin

Weekends are the days that I reserve to unwind from a busy week, and what better way to do it than to let the pressure off and wind up someone, or in this case, a feature of a wind-up penguin. This cute and clever waddling was created by Peter Zieske . It’s always a delight to see how the LEGO curvy shell element is used to shape the belly of this flightless bird.

Watch it in action, and don’t forget to wait to the end for the blooper reel.

This wind-up toy robot is programmed to love you all very much

If you like retro wind-up toy robots then set your phasers to Positively Delighted. It turns out Lino Martins (hey, that’s me!) has built one out of LEGO and the result is…pretty OK. It would probably be weird to label my own work as totally awesome, stupendous or earth-shattering so I’ll just go with pretty OK. He’s adorned in fabulously fifties black and sea-foam green with gray and just a touch of flashy silver. Through a series of gears, his chest plates open simultaneously and when you turn his wind-up key his head, heart and arms will rotate. Yes, he has a heart! I think it takes eight or ten or so rotations of the wind-up key to get his head, heart and arms to all settle back into their rightful positions. If I were a real engineer I’d know that for sure but… What am I, Elon Musk?

Check out this video of the wind-up action. This cheery bot is programmed to love you all very much. I’m programmed to be rather indifferent on the matter but I can create a swell playlist for any occasion so there’s that.