Hey, what is up everybody, Jason here. Today we're going to take a look at my
latest LEGO creation, which is this small model of two dolphins leaping out of the
water. The idea for this model was born,
probably over a year ago, when i got a couple of these dolphins in
a LEGO Friends set, and i thought it would be cool to build
a model of them swimming through the water.
So i started tinkering with some options, and the most obvious way of getting the
dolphins to follow an arcing path was to mount them at the end of a bar
rotating around an axle. So that the dolphin just spins around in a
circle ,and this is really quite simple and
kind of cool, but in order to get a nice shallow arc, which is what i had in mind
for this model, you need to make the circle quite large,
and the larger you make that circle, the taller the stand needs to be to
house it, and i do really like the movement this results in
but for this model i wasn't interested in building this enormous stand.
So, I kind of shelved the idea for a bit and fast forward to earlier this year I
decided to dust it off and work on it some more. This time, I started
playing around with this dual crank mechanism,
which consists of two offset crankshafts supporting these platforms that the
dolphins are mounted on. The way it works is that the front of
each platform is connected directly to the front crank,
and the back of the platform just freely rests on the rear crank.
And that way you can vary the offset between the crankshafts to subtly affect
the resulting motion. For example, if the crankshafts are
completely in sync the platform will always be horizontal
throughout the rotation. But if the front crank leads the rear
crank in its rotation, we get this nice shallow arcing motion, which is what i
was trying to achieve. And if you experiment with different
offsets, you can get some other interesting movement out of it.
Or adjust how much of an arc you actually want.
As far as the dolphins go, I actually quite like this dolphin mold,
but one drawback is that they are quite wide, and would require a four stud wide
gap in the water surface, and i really wanted
to minimize that gap so they wouldn't be as obvious.
So, I decided to brick build the dolphins so that they could fit through a two
stud wide gap. And, of course, you can design your own
animals or things to put on the platforms.
I also designed a couple of killer whales, and some shark fins.
I also have Emmett holding on for dear life, with some creative positioning so
that he actually fits through the gap. And, i even have shark boy here, though i
did have to remove his arms for him to fit straight through.
As you can see, you can do some fun things with it, and i'm looking forward
to tinkering with the mechanism a little
bit more to see what else it could be used for.
I have created building instructions for this model, which you can find over at
jkbrickworks.com. As always, thanks for watching, keep on
building, and i'll see you in the next one.