MAN ATTEMPTS TO BUILD GIANT MECHANICAL HEXAPOD SPIDER
James Hobson of The Hacksmith has attempted to build a giant mechanical spider that he calls "the world's largest rideable hexapod." Hobson got the idea when he watched a video of a tow shovel in action and noticed how the machine worked. He then thought about how he could improve it by adding more legs.
“In this video I take on building the world’s largest rideable hexapod, Megahex. A passion project of mine that has taken up the past year and a half of my life. What started out as a simple three-month build turned into a year and a half of failures, breakdowns, and rewrites. It all started when I came across a video of a Princess Auto excavator which was capable of orienting itself by using the bucket to stand up and maneuver. So what stops more legs lifting more bodies, as one giant unit?”
This project was ambitious from the start. Unfortunately it was too big to work properly.
“The thing is.. these excavators.. we were pushing these things way past the limit. I’m surprised it didn’t fail earlier to be completely honest. But yeah the excavator frame just completely tore itself in half. This is why companies go bankrupt when they build mechs. … I think we have to cut our losses with this project because at this point it’s ..it’s doing us no returns. There is no way that we could keep just allocating so much time and so much money to this project.”