Slashdot Mirror
Man Builds 7-foot Grandfather Clock from Lego
Ravalox writes "Eric Harshbarger has built a 7-foot-tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every 13 hours. Other pictures include the gears, numbers, the face, and the pendulum mechanics."
You know the mods are mentally retarded when they need to be told to mod a post like that down.
Either that or your extremely bored and have nothing better to do than find trolls before mods do.
When you design an escapement gear made only out of lego's that actually works than YOU can bitch about the colors matching.
For building the housing, this might be, but if you are limiting yourself to pure lego parts, there is a good deal of creativity involved in order to make a full-sized, functioning clock that is accurate without cheating.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Does anyone know if this guy was one of the people who tried to get the Lego Master Builder job awhile back? If not, then he probably missed out on a good chance. I looked at a bunch of the stuff they made during the "interview" for the master builder job, and they were quite amazing. So perhaps Eric wouldn't have blown away the competition, but he at least stands a shot.
I, however, will stick to building little houses and cars just like the directions indicate.
I think he meant the guy who wrote the slashdot submission, not the guy who built the clock.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
According to the bloody dictionary, news is "1 a : a report of recent events"
Eric's desk has been featured on Slashdot, 4 +YEARS ago. He built it in Aug of 2000. The Slashdot story was posted Aug 27, of the same year. He's made the front page of Slashdot 3 more times since.
He built the clock in January. 8 months before the desk, and the story.
This emphatically does NOT qualify as news anymore. No way, no how.
What is it the editors do here again? Anything useful?
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Either I live in a time warp, or this same exact story was one /. like 6+ months ago?
Can't you all at least approve stories that have NEW news in them?
I guess I don't understand the lego thing. Mind you, I grew up with an arc welder around and had lots of scrap to build stuff out of. Tinkering with legos, well, seemed silly when I could fabricate a perfectly useful table fireplace log holder which can support 500lbs without as much as a strain. :)
I would definently agree with you; playing with heat and metal is far more practical than plastic blocks, but making stuff with legos offers both a handicap and limitation that challenges the builders to be creative. With stuff like this it's not so much "look what I can do" but rather "look what I can do with all these limitations and obstacles". To reverse the roles, welding together a bunch of metal interlocking blocks and making a small castle out of them would be equally cool, even though the legos would have been an easier solution and ultimately achieved the same design.