Hey everyone, Jason here. Today we're going to take a look at my latest kinetic
sculpture which is this model of Apollo
the god of light, Sun, archery and a bunch
of other things, and here he is riding in
his chariot being pulled by a couple of
horses. I'm really happy with how this
model came together. I especially like
how all the gold trim on the chariot and
the wheels turned out. I think it ended
up looking quite sharp. Obviously the
main component of the motion here is the
running of the horses, but I also added
some movement to the chariot, which rocks
slightly on its axle, and also to the
figure itself, which moves in tandem with
the chariot, but the motion is a little
bit dampened, which I think makes it seem
a little bit more natural. If you are
familiar with some of my older models,
you may remember a previous horse I
designed all the way back in 2014, which
is this one, and this model was largely
Technic based and had an internal drive
mechanism which really had a large
impact on the overall look of this model,
and I always kind of had in the back of
my mind that I wanted to revisit this
model of a horse and build a more System style of horse and finally about a year
ago I started to tinker with a new
design which eventually ended up with
this. And when we take a look at these
horses, the most obvious difference is that
they are primarily made up of System
bricks, which allowed me to use all of
these nice curved slopes to capture the
shaping of a horse. What allowed me to do
that is that the drive system for the
legs is operating externally instead of
internally. There's a crankshaft that
runs beneath the horses, with rods
connected to the hoof of each leg which
control their position and orientation,
and the motion of each leg is just a
result of the constraints imposed by the joints.
And just like in the previous
model I tried to encapsulate some of the
more subtle aspects of the motion of a
running horse, including the rocking of
the body, the forward thrust of the head
and the flick of the tail.
And let's take a closer look at how all of that works.
So the main support is stationary and
the crank shaft runs through it about
halfway up.
And we're just going to put one side of the horse on, which is mounted on a pin
at its belly, so that it is free to tilt
forwards and backwards.
Next we'll add a way to control that tilt using this simple pair of lift arms,
so that the tilt can be controlled through an axle exposed on the other side of the body.
And that axle is where we are going to
connect the rear leg.
So that the tilt of the body is controlled through the movement of that leg.
Next we'll add the front leg.
The head and the neck assembly is flexible and the bottom of it is
mounted to the stationary stand and the
top is mounted at a point at the front shoulders.
So that the as the body tilts, the neck deforms and the head is pushed forward and pulled back.
The tail is mounted on a pin at the back of the body,
and the base of the tail just rests on
the stationary stand. As a result, again
as the body tilts the tail moves as well.
The left side of the body is just
mirrored from the right, and the legs are
mounted in the exact same way.
They're just driven from a crank that is
offset 90 degrees from the crank that
drives the right legs. Now, if you know
your way around horses and their gaits,
you will notice that these horses are
not really technically galloping. The
gait is much closer to a canter,
where the second rear hoof is placed at the same time as the first front hoof.
So, these horses are definitely not letting
it all out and galloping at full pace.
And that's just a side effect of the
simpler mechanism that I'm using,
but I really do love this mechanism since it did allow me to shape the horses with
system bricks, and it's also just a much
simpler and more reliable design,
which has a pretty big impact to the
performance of the model.
Especially when you're running it for six to eight hours a day at a show, the more complex the
mechanism, the more opportunity there is
for things to go wrong, things
to bind and wear down and come loose
over time, and I've already had this
model running at two full weekend events
with no problems whatsoever, which is
really awesome. And that's about it for
this model. I hope you enjoyed the model
and the video. As always, thanks for
watching, keep on building,
and I'll see you in the next one.
