K'nex Bridge in 3D

This bridge is from the K'nex Building Bridges set, which progressively explores a dozen bridge designs. Some of the later ones are more impressive, but I was more interested in making a stereograph than a bridge.

If you look at these images with a stereo viewer or by merging the two images with a free-viewing technique, it will be in 3D, ala the View-Master many of us enjoyed as kids, and some of us still enjoy.

No big whoopee, but this is my absolutely first stereo pair, so I am kind of pleased.

I used my regular camera, moving it to the side between exposures to create the divergent points of view.

The Manfrotto Modopocket may be my favorite camera accessory. For the stereograph (3D image pair), I put a metal ruler with a non-slip cork back on the table with the ends weighted, put the Modopocket against the ruler, and displaced it to the side along the ruler to create spaced parallel images for manipulating into a stereo pair.

For more on 3D photography, you might start with DrT's website.

Much fun.

And another way to enhance what was already good block play.

Addendum [12/24/09] - In my confusion, I had originally referred to the technique for viewing my image pair as using the "cross-eyed technique," which Dr T was kind enough to gently point out was wrong, since that requires a reversed stereo pair. I have corrected both the terminology and the link above.

Bridges & towers

For several days I have been working on bridges out of K'nex. First, I built the odd looking thing at right from a 1997 K'nex "educational" bridge set. The bridges of that set seemed to have been designed from sketches of different bridge types, not from real bridges - which may be why K'nex came out with a larger, more accurate, and much more expensive "Real Bridges" set. It surely inspired the name.

After building that bridge "by the book" (or at least "by the card"), I more or less duplicated it using longer K'nex rods, and omitting that truly odd support structure.

I continued to fiddle with it over the next several days, which included an excellent "research" (more accurately "inspiration") trip to a lovely Pratt truss on the Snoqualmie Valley Trail - the former Milwaukee Road Cedar Falls to Monroe railway line, converted in that segment to a hiking and biking trail.

I like the results (top). This version is about five feet long.

Today, I decided I had had enough K'nex, and it was time for some fischertechnik, so I brought out the Universal set again, and built this nice communications tower (left).

I've fiddled with a few short bridge trusses out of fischertechnik, and am just about ready to do something substantial. It may have to be a mixture of yellow and gray - a bridge in the process of being repainted?

Whichever direction I take with it, I am sure it will be Good Block Play.

Just as these projects were all Good Block Play.

K'nex

K'nex has been around just long enough - 15 years - that it may qualify as a classic, but if you haven't taken a look at it lately, you might be in for some surprises: Micro K'nex and K'nex bricks, for example. Also a new logo: bolder and more angular against a black background - not so interesting in itself perhaps, but in a store with a variety of K'nex sets, it can help steer you to the ones with micro & bricks.

The micro K'nex are 60%-size versions of classic K'nex parts. Since their first announcement, I have been hoping for a pure-micro set - a "pocket K'nex." But no such luck: so far they are just appearing as supplemental parts in regular sets, with bottle-shaped adapter rods to connect to micro to regular. In exchange for the special features they add to the models that use them, there is some cost in robustness. Smaller connections just can't be as sturdy as regular K'nex: The wind kept blowing over my windmill during my Gasworks Park photo expedition, and if the tumble was very far, I found reassembly required and occasionally had to search through the grass for tiny missing parts.

The K'nex bricks are compatible, brickwise, with the usual suspects, which provides some interesting combination options. Unlike most similar products though, K'nex bricks have rounded edges which provide easy fingernail purchase for separating connected bricks. All bricks (that I have seen so far) have holes for 5mm peg connectors, for either micro or regular K'nex. Which is just shy of being compatible with the similar holes and plug connectors of Lego Technic (and some regular Lego). Sigh.

The set I got to try out micro & bricks came in a new case design that was sufficiently warped that most micro pieces could conceivably find their way out the gap. Worse, it takes no advantage of the new brick connection options to provide a buildable surface. Sigh again.

However, there were more pleasures than disappointments. With or without the new parts types, K'nex remains Good Block Play.