Strandbeest

At the Fivium Christmas party this year I got given a Strandbeest kit in the Secret Santa. I thought this was excellent and had enough fun building it and playing with it that I figured it was good enough to make a quick post about before closing out the year. Below is a picture of the box I unwrapped (along with a kazoo, but that’s another story entirely) and it instantly made me want to go home and put it together. As a watcher of Tested videos I’d already seen Adam Savage put one of these kits together and it definitely looked like fun.

I used to do a lot more physical crafts as a child than I do now. From Warhammer and Airfix to Lego and Meccano but these days it’s almost all digital. And while there’s nothing wrong with being creative digitally I do sometimes get nostalgic about the smell of paints and glue, trimming plastic parts down etc. to just the tangible feeling of holding some kind of creation after making it instead of staring at it through a screen or listening to it via headphones. So getting a kit like this instantly got me excited to tear into it and get constructing.

The instructions stated that there was no glue or screws required to build which was interesting to me, I thought it would need glue somewhere at least. But the closest it got was a few bits of supplied and cut double-sided tape to hold the fan blades on.

After an hour or two, and only one cut to my thumb from trimming the plastic after breaking it off the sprue, my Strandbeest was complete.

It was good fun to play with, powered by the fan on front and blowing it (or using a desk fan) or using the supplied pole to make it walk. If you want to get one for yourself you can find them on Amazon easily or look in your local hobby store.