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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."

13 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Boy he'll be pissed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...when his (grand)kid shows up and takes the thing apart to play with it.

  2. wow! by ssand · · Score: 5, Funny

    what's next for him? A seven foot tall girlfriend made entirely of lego?

    1. Re:wow! by Besjon · · Score: 5, Funny

      No no, a seven foot tall girlfriend made entirely of lego would be mortally dangerous as it could lead to a crushed pelvis and death by snu-snu.

  3. Kit by leapis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd love to know when the kit for this goes on sale. Of all the large-scale Lego designs I've seen, just once I'd like someone to start selling a kit or at least instructions to built it yourself.

  4. Re:slashdotted already... by meatflower · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When you design an escapement gear made only out of lego's that actually works than YOU can bitch about the colors matching.

  5. MIrrors by kerbe6 · · Score: 5, Informative
  6. Re:Google cache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why do people insist on using the google cache when the pictures tell most of the story. It's still pulling the pictures from the original souce.
    Now this coralized link on the other hand is pulling from the coral servers and since the pictures are relative (rather than absolute), coral works quite well.

  7. Re:No Electricity.... by Dephex+Twin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Doesn't guy wrote this know that at the time when a these 6 foot wonders were invented, there WAS NO ELECTRICITY !!. It runs on pure potential energy stored in weights.
    I think it is safe to say he does, since he built a working grandfather clock, and probably didn't re-invent the mechanical design himself from scratch.

    The interesting part is that it would be much harder to make a real grandfather clock (like the one at my ancestral home) - because Lego in comparison is easier to build.
    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
  8. For a while there I thought I was the only one... by tonyz2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    who had a House of Yes movie poster over my fireplace. Phew. (only on Slashdot..)

    --
    click here to incinerate homeless people
  9. All I can say by RealProgrammer · · Score: 5, Funny

    is it's about time someone did this.

    We should give this guy a big hand. And then a second hand. But then, he's probably got his hands all in place already.

    Can this run Linux? It would be a great NTP server.

    --
    sigs, as if you care.
  10. Re:server made of lego too? by cide1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just finishing up my end of semester projects, had to analyze several CPUs I designed this semester. One very simple one used 1048 logic cells, but could do integer arithmetic, jumps, branches, and memory operations. Not quite sure how many transistors that translates too, but normally an FPGA cell is a binary operation. Removing several of the odd arithmetic operations would lower that size quite a bit more. I also designed a 5 stage pipelined CPU with 32 word instruction cache, and 32 word data cache in about 2300 logic cells.

    When the first vacuum tube based computers were invented, I'll built the designers felt like they were implementing a CPU of this size in Legos. It seems funny now, but this analogy probably holds a lot of water.

    --
    -- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
  11. Ahh, back in the days... by skids · · Score: 5, Funny

    When "computer architecture" consisted of asking the question "how big a room do we need to hold it?"

  12. Re:server made of lego too? by zeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.