Attacking Inchworm: Living Up To It's Namesake

The first project for the Emerging Tech class was to take a children's hobby science kit and deconstruct and then reconstruct it. This particular kit was a solar powered "Attacking Inchworm", which was sadly disappointing to me as it seemed "attacking" refereed to attacking my desire to see some fierce battle action. It was a very cute and fun kit to make and I would have loved to have something like this as a kid, heck, I might have gotten into physical computer much younger if this had been available... but it still left me with a big empty hole. The inchworm needed to live up to it's name, and thus my goal was set. The attacking inchworm needed a makeover, steampunk style.

I'm a bit of an eclectic/eccentric collector. I have a thing with watch and clock gears, sprockets, wires, metal bits and all sorts of interesting parts you find in clocks and watches or scrap yard or metal scrap bins. So far my collection has been pretty useless. I've gathered things with ideas of using them in sculpture and one day learning how to construct an actual moving sculpture using the gears in a more or less tradition/realistic fashion . When I got the inchworm in my little hands I felt that I finally had a good venue to test out some of my ideas. I had this grand scheme (as I usually do) that was far more complicated then time would allow. I wanted to have a great deal of parts modified and attached to the worm. I wanted to have it painted and polished and just give it a rugged yet eloquent appeal. Buuuut, time ran down and I realized I had bitten off more then I could chew. Story of my life, seriously. And to make matters even more interesting... when I was constructing my little worm I hadn't considered the fact that the original gear ratio for the motor and moving parts may indeed have reduced speed, but in doing so had increased power. And when I decided speed was more important then power I sort of neglected to remember that I was going to be adding weight to the motor. Oops. Well, it still looks pretty cool right?

 

And of course everything is better with ninjas. Fight!

There's even a short video thanks to Colin Ives, our Emerging Tech. instructor.

 
Christine Thomas did a steam-punk worm from Colin Ives on Vimeo.

 In the near future I'd like to add gears and parts to this and then finish the painting I had envisioned. I think this could be pretty amazing with the last few touches I had wanted to give it, maybe even upgrade that motor so this baby can actually move. Then it will truly live up to its name and be one intimidating fighting machine!