Back in October 2011 I posted about contraptions and discussed this idea I had for a mechanical eight-legged abseiling device which I named the Arachnoflyvver. A few years ago I had built a working model of the device, but it had gone missing on my travels. However, not long ago, I found most of it, and decided to do a quick tidy up of it and present it here to to the loyal readers of Honzablog.
Note the streamlined teardrop, or egg shape, and the three stylish chrome strips on the side. The pilot, and his trombone, is probably in another state, so the e-plus wooden block bloke was pushed into service as a stand-in pilot. Slightly out of scale, but you get the idea.
The cityscape is made up of photos of sections of old buildings from around Rockhampton which were printed out and tiled together to make tallish buildings. We don't have that many of your actual Artdeco Skyscrapers here in Rocky, its not New York, y'know!
Also, check out the video to see how it all actually works! And it Does! Sort of... Something had gone wrong with the electrics, so the device had to be manually lifted, unfortunately its on-board winch was not working.
The feet are made from pencil erasers, but I think next time I would make proper articulated and sprung, self leveling mechanical feet, maybe a bit like the prosthetic feet used by amputee runners. Even so, the rubber feet weren't quite gripping on my printed building facade, so, just for the video, I had to put a towel on the surface to give it some traction. Funny, I'm sure it used to work okay just on the bare wooden legs. Perhaps because they were linked and not independently rotating as they are now...
The device would be transfer to the climbing site on the back of a truck, the grappling hook launched from a harpoon gun mounted on the truck's roof.
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