- Hey, what's up friends?
Welcome back to Brick by Brick.
I'm your host, Adam Ward.
If you're wondering why I'm giggling
while staring into this odd-looking LEGO contraption,
well I've got an answer for you.
We made a LEGO kaleidoscope.
Yeah, a working LEGO kaleidoscope
that actually looks awesome.
I didn't know if we could do it.
Steve was like, "Let's make a LEGO kaleidoscope!"
And I was like, "That's not even a thing."
Now it's a thing, my friends.
A kaleidoscope is an amazing optical illusion,
it's not even an illusion 'cause it's really happening.
When you have a clear cylinder,
with a bunch of translucent pieces
that refract and reflect light,
and it puts on a crazy, wonderful show for your eye.
This thing is bananas, I can't wait for you to see it.
But before you can see it,
you gotta learn how to make your own.
Friends, it's kaleidoscope time.
The scope is basically a collection of one-by-four pieces
connected by some hinges.
So we're gonna start at the end,
the part closest to the tumbler.
First thing's first, we grab three one-by-fours.
Then we grab our hinges and we attach our one-by-fours
by connecting the hinges evenly on each side.
That forms our triangle.
This is gonna be the overall shape of our scope.
The equilateral triangle helps light bounce off the sides,
and just makes amazing designs.
Once we've got our hinges in place,
we're gonna put another row of plates right on top.
Have a really strong foundation for our scope.
We don't want it falling apart in our hands,
that's no fun.
On top of these, we're gonna put one single layer of bricks.
Brick, brick, brick.
Then we've got some really cool two-by-two SNOT plates.
So these plates are gonna go on
and the external studs are gonna be on the outside,
'cause we want to keep the inside of our kaleidoscope
nice and smooth.
All right, now we've got those pieces in place,
we are gonna do four more rows of bricks.
On this side, one, two, three, four.
Now once we got those, it's time to solidify our design.
Make it a little bit stronger,
so we put another row of these hinges.
Still following the same angle that we started.
Now on top of these, we're gonna do five rows of bricks.
Great, now we just need another row of hinges
to lock in those pieces.
Boom.
Bada.
Boom.
And now what we're gonna do
is we're gonna make the edges a little bit more rounded,
so when we're holding it up to our eye,
we don't poke ourselves in the edge of our eye
with the corner or anything like that.
So we've got some really cool rounded pieces.
So on top of the hinges,
we're gonna go with a one-by-four.
Just a plate and then on top of those plates,
we do a one-by-two plate,
so we can then attach our little telephone piece.
This is the one-by-four curved tile,
which creates a really lovely eyepiece.
So you can go right up to your eye,
without any concern about poking yourself.
And even though there's no pieces on this side,
we're already getting some cool effects.
Now on this end where we added
the one, two, three, four, five, six SNOT pieces,
if you don't have six, really, you only need two.
I like to put 'em on each side
just to be even with the design,
and that also helps us attach our arm
to any side that we want.
But, since it's an equilateral triangle,
all the sides are basically the same.
So my friends, it is time to build the arm.
This is where the scope gets attached to the tumbler,
and the magic meets our eye.
The arm has got a lot of pieces,
because it's gotta hold the tumbler steady
and make sure that it doesn't fall off
while you're looking through the scope.
So we use a lot of plates, stacked in specific ways,
so that your arm is super strong.
This arm works out.
So we're gonna kick off the arm with these six plates.
They're all two wide and we've got
an eight, a 12, two more eights and two sixes.
We basically just make a pile of these six bricks.
The sixes go right on top of each other.
The eights go right on top of each other,
and then go right on top of the sixes, like that.
The 12 goes on top of that whole creation,
and then our final eight goes on top, right in the middle,
so we've got two bricks here and two bricks there.
Final product looks like that.
So that does it for the part of the arm
that attaches to the scope.
Now for the part of the arm
that attaches to the tumbler itself.
We've got another collection of plates that are two wide.
We've got two two-by-sixes.
Three two-by-eights.
And one big boy, a two-by-12.
We also have four of these modified plates,
with the cool slope on the edge.
We'll get to that later.
So we're gonna start with our biggest piece first,
our two-by-12.
We're gonna put our six on top,
so it's hanging off by one set of studs.
And our eight on the other side.
So we've got one opening there, and one opening there.
Then we're gonna take another six and eight,
and put 'em right on top.
We're gonna switch the sides
so that our seams don't line up,
so this arm is nice and strong.
And then on top of this whole number,
we're going to put our two-by-eight right in the middle,
so we have an opening of three here,
and an opening of three there.
Now for our little cool modified pieces.
We're gonna put these on the very end,
two on that side, two on this side.
Finished product looks like that.
Now we're gonna bridge the gap between the two arms.
We've got the arm that's over the tumbler,
and the part that's over the scope.
So what we need to connect them is two two-by-eights.
So the opening that we left over here,
connects to the opening that we left here.
And no surprise what's coming next,
the opening we left there connects to that opening as well.
Now because we want this to be really strong,
we want to put more pieces on top.
But we don't want it to be too bulky.
So instead of using more plates or even bricks,
what we're gonna use is some tiles.
So we've got a collection of tiles that will snap on,
and you can use any size you want,
you just want to make sure that you're using nice big tiles
that connect all the pieces.
You don't want a seam there or there.
They're gonna live just like that.
Our arm is almost complete,
all we need to do is add the braces.
So the right brace has three one-by-four bricks,
which we just stack, one on top of the other.
And then we're gonna add these cool SNOT plates.
I'm gonna add them just like this.
And under those, we're going to do two one-by-four plates.
Go right up in there.
And then, we use two more one-by-two plates.
And below the one-by-two plate,
one final of our little SNOT one-by-twos.
Now the other brace that comes down,
is built similarly but uses different SNOT pieces.
You have three one-by-four bricks, put those together.
Then we connect those to our SNOT bricks,
and these are one-by-two SNOT bricks,
and it's very important that we connect them like this,
because these go on the bottom of our turntable.
And then we wanna add this one-by-four
to make it even stronger.
So what we do is we use these two-by-two tiles,
put them on top and lock them together.
So we are done with the arm for now,
we're gonna put these pieces aside and it is tumbler time.
So the base of it is
these four quarter-circle four-by-fours.
So basically just put those together,
to get our pretty circle,
and then in the center,
we're gonna put a smaller circle,
a four-by-four circle all the way around.
Now, since the tumbler is big,
if we didn't put something in the middle,
to space out the translucent pieces,
if we filled it up, they would block out all of the light
and we wouldn't have a cool, kaleidoscopic effect.
So what we're gonna do,
is we're gonna build a transparent, meaning see-through,
column in the center.
So what we do is we have these super cool
one-by-two-by-fives, 'cause they're five tall.
And we're gonna put these all the way around.
And what these do is they're gonna help
knock our pieces around as we tumble,
and they're gonna allow more light
to pass through the pieces.
We can lock those together with not one,
but two of these rounded four-by-fours.
Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna begin
to surround the perimeter of our tumbler,
with these awesome transparent curved one-by-four-by-fives.
So we're gonna put on one, we're gonna put on two,
we're gonna put on three,
but we're gonna pump our brakes
and pause before we get to four,
because we wanna leave an opening so we can pour
all of our fun pieces inside.
So we're just gonna put this fourth one aside,
don't worry, we're still gonna invite you to the party,
just gotta kick it for a second.
Now, you can see why we added two of these plates on top,
because now our interior column is the same height
as our outer wall.
So what we're gonna do next,
is take these quarter-circles and put them right on top,
and just like we held off on a quarter of the wall,
we're gonna hold off on a quarter of the ceiling.
Just let it hang out there for one second.
Now what we're gonna do is flip our entire build over,
and reinforce the base and add the turntables,
so the whole tumbler can move.
So, we're gonna grab a four-by-four,
this one doesn't have to be circle,
and then four one-by-four plates.
These go all the way around.
It's gonna help our tumbler stay together
even when we're spinning it super fast.
And then in the dead center of our four-by-four,
we're going to attach a two-by-two turntable.
Love these little pieces.
Just like that.
And now if we flip it back over,
you can see how our piece is going to spin.
Now for the fun, now to add some translucent pieces inside.
So, there are all sorts of
different shapes and sizes of translucent pieces.
If you use small ones, they'll have a
less of a chance of getting caught on something.
So I've got a bunch of translucent one-by-one plates.
You can also use tiles,
I just recommend something smaller than a brick.
Seems to be a good amount.
And we'll take our final piece, see I told you,
you we're coming to the party.
And then, our sealing piece comes in.
Snaps in just like that.
I've made a few of these,
so I have an idea of how many to put in.
But this is a great time to put it on its side
give it a little spin.
You never want the top to be totally bare
and you never want the top to be totally packed.
So now we're gonna reinforce the ceiling.
So we're gonna grab another four-by-four plate.
Very gently, we don't want to squeeze too hard.
And then around that, same thing as we did on the floor.
One-by-four plates all the way around.
That's gonna keep our tumbler nice and secure.
And right on top of that,
we do another two-by-two turntable.
Now you can hold the two turntables in your fingers.
You get that awesome spinning effect.
So all we have to do now
is add a little bit of height to the top and to the bottom
so this fits perfectly into our arm.
And to do that, we use some rounded four-by-fours.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna
add two to the bottom and three to the top.
But before we add the ones to the top,
we're gonna put some tiles around our turntable,
so the motion is really nice and smooth.
So four one-by-two tiles, all the way around,
and then we go...
stay still, turntable!
One...
two...
three.
And now for the bottom, we're gonna add two,
so we can stack them right on top of each other.
And we also want to put tiles here,
but we can't put it on the bottom,
so we have to put it on these.
So right on the outsides,
we leave the middle open to accommodate
our two-by-two turntable.
We put four two-by-two tiles, pick up our tumbler,
line it up just like that.
Now we can hold it in our hand, give it a little test spin.
Still in really good shape.
Now we're gonna attach this to our arm.
So here come the arm pieces,
one for the bottom and then one for the top,
and then the rest of our arm.
So, the bottom of these bricks, is going to line up exactly
with the center of the four-by-four
around the plates we put on the top.
And if we flip our tumbler over and look at the bottom,
these pieces line up exactly
with the bottom of these four-by-four rounded plates.
And if we move the arms to the top,
they connect right into the rest of our arm.
Give it a squeeze all around.
Nice and sturdy, good spin action.
We bring our scope back in.
And our scope attaches right in the middle,
to the back of our arm.
And now, for the moment of truth.
Whoa!
It gets me every time.
Our kaleidoscope is complete.
And while I was prototyping, I was like,
LEGO bricks, they're pretty reflective.
But what would it be like if we actually put mirrors inside?
So I did make one
that just has some crafting mirrors attached.
They really add quite a lot,
so you definitely don't need to put them in,
but if you live near a craft store,
or you feel like getting crafty online,
you can attach some craft mirrors
with some double-sided tape and even enhance the effect.
So whether you use craft mirrors or keep it 100% LEGO,
I'd love to see what design you come up with,
and what colors and combinations and patterns
you can create with your LEGO kaleidoscope.
It's been so much fun building with you.
Thank you for watching.
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Friends, I will see you next time.