Andrew Lipson's LEGO® Page

 


Voted Cool LEGO Site of the Week
Nov 5th - 11th 2000

Because The LEGO Company get paranoid about this sort of thing I suppose I'd better make it clear that I have no formal affiliation with them, that my views are my own and do not necessarily represent theirs, and so on. So if you think any of this is official you are as deluded as they are.

I like LEGO. Especially TECHNIC. And none of those flashy bendy tubes, body panels or disk-throwing arms. Give me mechanisms ...


My Creations

 Here are a few of my creations for your delectation and delight. You will probably want LDRAW or MLCAD or a compatible program if you want to follow my directions actually to build any of these...
 

A nice design for a one-way gear mechanism built out of LEGO Technic. Turn the input axle clockwise and the output axle turns clockwise. Turn the input axle anti-clockwise and the output axle still turns clockwise... Encase it in a box of black LEGO bricks to hide the mechanism and confuse your friends...


A machine for turning itself off (built to amuse my five-year-old. It worked).


A Hoberman Sphere (well OK, I guess it's a Hoberman Octahedron really, but only because I was running out of pieces). I just wondered whether it was possible to build one out of LEGO. Silly me - of course it is. And I finally found a use for all those bent technic beams... Is this cool, or what?

A mechanism to allow one motor to select which of four outputs a second motor will drive . The idea is to make the most of the limited number of outputs from a Mindstorms RCX. You probably need a rotation sensor to make this useful,  though.

Of course, LEGO rotation sensors are ludicrously expensive, so here's my poor man's rotation sensor, which uses a touch switch to count revolutions on a (reasonably slowly) rotating shaft.

Least but not last is my ' bendy axle ', which is a sort of substitute for the LEGO universal axle joint. This takes up more room, but can turn through sharper angles. It can probably handle more torque too, though I haven't tested this.

A non-technic item for a change. My LEGO renditions of Dilbert and colleagues .

A small collection of Mathematical LEGO sculptures .

Rodin's 'Thinker'.  This took a lot of work, despite starting from computer-generated instructions based on photographs (actually the programming was nearly half of the project),

Escher's 'Balcony'. This was a joint project with a friend, Daniel Shiu. We worked on it intermittently for nearly three months...

Escher's 'Belvedere'. Another joint project with Daniel Shiu, though we only spent a few evenings spread over two or three weeks on this one.

Escher's 'Ascending and Descending'. My third joint project with Daniel Shiu.

New! Escher's 'Relativity'. My fourth joint project with Daniel Shiu. No software or camera tricks, but some very fiddly construction

New! Escher's 'Waterfall'. Yet another project with Daniel Shiu. Some fairly serious cheating went on here, but there are several points of interest in the LEGO construction itself too.


Useful Links

General

To www.lugnet.comI can't imagine many people visiting this page won't already know about LUGNET , but just in case...
LUGNET is The One Site for Things Of LEGO Interest on the web. Much, much better than The LEGO Company's site unless you are a small child (though you
may want to go there as well - if you have a fast enough modem).

For recording LEGO designs, check out the LDRAW site . You will need LDRAW or MLCAD, or some compatible program, to make
sense of my creations listed above..

TECHNIC

While there are zillions of excellent LEGO fan sites out there, there aren't all that many really good technic-related sites. Here are a few:

Leo's LEGO (wonderful collection of mechanisms and ideas, including a working pendulum clock, and lots of non-technic stuff too).
CSSOH's LEGO Pneumatics pages (if you're at all interested in LEGO Pneumatics you must look here).
Denis Cousineau's LEGO Technic Pages (Nice robotic arm, physics of LEGO, Mindstorms stuff)
Jennifer Clark's LEGO Construction Site (Stunningly good building site-type Technic models. I wish The LEGO Group could come up with something half as good as these).

While there doesn't seem to be much other LEGO-related material on his website, Don Rogerson has made a very nice working orrery out of technic

 

Sculpture

Like technic, LEGO sculpture seems to be somewhat of a minority interest. Here are some links, though.

Eric Harshbarger's LEGO site has some amazing sculptures. Don't miss The Desk!
Henry Lim's LEGO Sculptures is where to find, among other things, a huge LEGO stegosaurus. I wish I had that many bricks...
Adrian Drake's web size, brickfrenzy.com, has some LEGO sculptures (and much else besides).
Rob Butera's LEGO model of the Earth. A man after my own heart, Rob used a geophysical data set obtained online to computer-generate the specifications for this sculpture.
Bill Ward has LEGO sculptures of Pokemon characters and a teddy bear on his website.




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The pictures on this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2000-2002

LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group, who have nothing to do with this or any of my other LEGO-related web pages.

All M. C. Escher works (C) Cordon Art, Baarn, the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The official M.C. Escher web site is worth a visit.

DILBERT Characters © United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Reproduced by permission of UFS and Scott Adams

 

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This page last modified 1st April 2005