Guy's Moth

One of my friends whom I met through work has a very enviable job working at the Lego land Windsor site workshops as the head model maker .

His job takes him all over the world. He and his team make the Lego models for a lot of the Lego sites and Discovery centers spread around the globe.

I have been round the workshops and it is mind blowing !!

the racks and racks of parts bins with every Lego brick you can think of (and some you can't)

It weighs 145 kg and is going to hang from the roof of a shopping mall in Istanbul outside the entrance of the new Lego discovery Center.

Then he has another 2 to do one for Michigan and the other for Shanghai !!


What a job!

 

 

Animated pilot


OK there's nothing new hear, and you can go on line and shell out a few hundred pounds

for one,

but there is a small story behind this.

Firstly my 1/5 scale moth has an Action man pilot with a head turn via a 5G servo, connected to the rudder on a Y lead that looks quite good .


And if you look on my hanger page you can see my Piper Cub with a sculpted head that looks like me.


Now as my job is an animatronics engineer I decided for the Moth I wanted to go one stage further and incorporate new technology into the pilot.

I want to incorporate


  1. 3D scanning

  2. 3D printing

  3. Advanced movement

  4. PLC programmable controller

  5. micro tailoring


although I have a lot of the technology at hand the 3D elements I had to source, a quick look on the internet and I found a guy just around the corner called Dean Punchard who owns

ARD DIGITAL www.arddigital.co.uk 01484 937399 his company specializes in CGI animation in all areas, and he can scan and 3D print. as I wanted my head in ¼ scale

I went round to see him and told him what I wanted and although it wasn't something

he would normally do he said he would have a go (my kind of guy) .


He started with the scan which came out really well after he had touched it up on his computer.

So the head was 3D printed.

When items are printed they are printed in layers and the item has very small steps in it

these can be easily sanded out or there is a Smooth On liquid you can coat it in.

the problem is you lose some detail.

So it was decided to mould the head and make a sculpt-able wax head then add more detail and smooth it all out, re cast the wax head and then pull out the finished head from the final mould. The photos and video below are the first printed head without all the detail which I have used to experiment with for the animation.

Now to make a body for the pilot and fit the animation.

This video is the first prototype of the animation hooked up to a receiver and radio to test full movement.

 

The pilot completed

 

 

 

The body was 3D printed and the animatronics are controlled by Pololu board.

 

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