Here’s the Making-Of reel showing some of the techniques used.

Note that the studio has acquired the Hasbro’s latest release of the “Star Wars 3.75″ Super Deluxe Vehicle: AT-AT.” Just one big hunk of plastic awesomeness.

I have an RSS news feed from Dark Roasted Blend going and they often have great project inspirations.

This morning’s was Utterly Irresistible Robot Sculptures –pictures of really amazing robot sculptures.

Power is specified as a 200 cc Honda one-cylider engine. Wheels are based on 17″ x 2″ motorcycle rims. Total car weight must be under 250 lbs.

I love the look and these would be great building projects. If we built some using 50 cc engines they would fall into the strange regulation world of “mopeds” and perhaps be made some sort of street legal.

Resources:

• An Introduction to CycleKarting
• Bill Spears and his Cyclekart
• San Antone chapter of the cyclekart builders
• Cyclekart Yahoo group

One of our students from an early workshop, Reggie, wanted to make a globe. We said “sure.” Our strategy was to build it out of layers of pine — and that was REALLY hard.

We all took turns rasping and sanding that #$%@ thing:

We made a “skin” for it using gords painstakingly laid out with huge rulers and large homemade compasses and Reggie drew his ideas of an old-fashioned map onto them.

In the end we had an OK first effort definitely falling into the “Done Is Good” category.

If we were going to do it again I’d unhesitatingly buy a big wood lathe and simply turn the big ball on a lathe.

Or, I’d take other’s beautiful work as a good example:

Today I saw this great project at the MAKE blog

Image by davesbit from Flickr

From MAKE: Flickr member davesbit built a globe by making a mold from a beach ball, and designed a map for it using The Generic Mapping Tools.

The globe is about 20 inches in diameter, made from fiberglass and filled with foam. The map parts are built with the Generic Mapping Tools and glued on…

Making-of photos on the Flickr photo page.

What a fun idea.

Diana Eng over at Make presents an awesome project taking a toy Star Trek original series communicator and making it into a bluetooth headset for your cell phone.

I actually own one of these toy communicators and this would be a great project to encourage building out and validating our electronics projects infrastructure.

Sorry Steven, I think you’re pwned. Awesome. The comment says “1500 hours of moving legobricks and taking photos of them.”

I found this great video at YouTube blogged about at Japanator.