Fleet Feet

This thing just looks like speed on two legs. It’s got huge feet, which should give it better traction at high speeds, and the wings are small and lumpy, which is usually the case with landbound birds. To build it, you’ll need to be a member of the online LEGO® Club so you can access the instructions here . This combiner uses one POHATU and one ONEWA set.

Okay, so now that the first impression is over, we can take a closer look. My first concern is that the torso is thicker at the shoulders than it is at the hip (which makes no sense for a bird that can’t fly), but as I was to find out, it’s a lot trickier to build it the other way around. The next one is that the feet actually seem too big to me. I considered replacing them with THROWBOT™ feet, but they were too small. The head takes a little getting used to, but I checked out every other KANOHI shape, and none of them really seem to work with this design.

I love the wing design, however. They’re short, fat, and they look completely ineffective for anything but providing balance while running at high speeds. They’re also mounted with ball-joints, so they are highly posable.

The other interesting aspect to the wings, or at least one of them, is that the gear system ties the neck rotation to the up/down movement of the left wing. If you raise the left wing, the DIKAPI looks to the left. Lower it and it looks to the right. I did find, however, that the wing weighs so much that it will often sag unless you keep the pieces in the gear system extremely tight. I found that swapping a third small gear in for the T-joint used to mount the right wing results in a counter-balanced load between the two wings. This pretty much eliminates that whole wing-sag thing.

0 Comments

Reply