A 20-year-old mastermind from Romania has built the world’s first full-size Lego car, with a compressed air-powered Lego engine. It has space for two passengers and can hit a top speed of around 30 kph (18.6 mph). At this point, you should probably watch the rather awesome video, embedded below.Dubbed the Super Awesome Micro Project, the Lego car was conceived by Steve Sammartino of Melbourne and constructed in Romania by Raul Oaida. The build, which took 20 months to complete, was crowdfunded by 40 patrons to the tune of $22,000. While the car consists of more than 500,000 Lego pieces, the diminutive plastic brick was eschewed for some of the key, load-bearing components, such as the tires and wheels — and for things like gauges, which are rather hard to build out of Lego. The most exciting part of the Lego hot rod, of course, is the engine — which, rather miraculously, appears to be fashioned entirely out of Lego. There don’t seem to be many technical details, other than it consists of four separate orbital engines, each equipped with 64 cylinders and pistons.
Without seeing inside the engine there’s a bit of a question mark over the “orbital” label — orbital engines, which were invented in 1972, are an odd type of engine that, as far as we know, never really got past the prototype stage. It is more likely that the Super Awesome Micro Project is actually powered by a radial engine (and indeed, it looks like a radial engine). In a radial engine, the pistons all work in concert to drive a central crank shaft. Somewhere out of sight is a canister of compressed air that drives each of the 256 pistons.Sammartino and Oaida say that the hot rod is capable of 20-30 kph, but that they drive it slowly as they’re scared of a ‘giant Lego explosion.’ Presumably there is a hard limit on how much air pressure the Lego cylinders can withstand, and thus how high the engine can rev. Or considering the blocks are almost certainly glued together, maybe the limiting factor is heat dissipation — those pistons, without any kind of real air or liquid cooling, are probably generating a fairly large amount of heat.
The Super Awesome Micro Project was a one-off project that was mainly done for self-serving PR reasons — Sammartino himself is a marketing guy, and he drummed up crowdfunding by telling the patrons that, “Your association [with the project] will be the most interesting thing on your career or entrepreneurial hacker techie CV.” Oaida, however, is just an all-round Lego nerd and cool guy: you might vaguely remember his name from 2012, when he commemorated the end of the Space Shuttle by floating a Lego Space Shuttle to 35,000 meters — the lower edge of the stratosphere (video embedded below).Now read: TCP/IP over Lego model trainChevy Builds Life-Sized Lego Batmobile. After 1,833 hours of labor and 344,187 Lego bricks, Chevy unveiled a life-sized Lego Batmobile during the first day of the Detroit Auto Show. Chevy partnered with Warner Bros. to help promote The Lego Batman Movie, as well as get a few chuckles with a silly commercial they released with it.In the commercial, the carmaker’s “Real People, Not Actors” campaign featured a focus group of animated Lego characters who are asked what kind of person would drive the Lego Batmobile.“
It’s all black, probably someone with self-esteem issues,” replies one of the mini-figures.Sorry, wannabe Caped Crusaders, the Lego Batmobile is not available for purchase, but you can create your own on Chevy’s website. Check it out below. This ad will close in seconds... Skip to main content Skip to secondary content News > 'Featured' > You Ain’t Cool Unless You Drive a Life-Size, Air-Powered Lego Hot Rod You Ain’t Cool Unless You Drive a Life-Size, Air-Powered Lego Hot Rod December 18, 2013 at 4:37 pm by Alexander Stoklosa It doesn’t matter how young or old you are—if you frequent this space, it’s more probable than not that bizarre and highly technical Lego projects get you excited. Considering the bulk of C/D’s staff consists of man-children of questionable maturity, you can bet that we almost fell over ourselves with giddiness when we saw this ridiculously awesome life-size Lego car that actually drives on—where else?—YouTube.
Assembled by a group operating under the fitting banner “Super Awesome Micro Project,” the car features full Lego bodywork, seating for two, and an air-powered Lego radial engine. According to the Super Awesome Micro Project website, the car’s development began with a tweet from an Australian entrepreneur requesting funds for something “awesome.” That blip apparently snowballed into a rather-successful crowd-sourced funding campaign. Money in hand, the Australian backed a guy in Romania, who assembled the car from more than 500,000 Lego pieces before shipping it to a secret location in Australia. The “engine” is actually four radial engines fitted end to end (look closely at the picture above and you can pick out the four sections), and features 256 pistons. It runs on compressed air, and the team says it has gotten the car up to between 12 and 19 mph. It sounds like some top-end speed was left on the table in order to avert a massive Lego explosion. First Drive: 2015 Subaru WRX Sedan
First Drive: 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder First Drive: 2014 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD Doubt that a full-Lego structure could carry two full-grown adults and bounce down a street without shaking itself to pieces? Consider yourself sharp, because you’re right—it probably couldn’t. That’s why the SuperAwesomeMicroProject uses some non-Lego items to bolster the structure, as well as for the wheels and, we assume, the driveline. But still, we consider this Lego hot rod a momentous achievement, not the least because we figure that with enough money, leniency from our significant others, the plans to that crazy engine, and empty garage space, we might just have found a winter project to top all others. Building that engine alone would be fulfilling enough, but what’s an engine without a car for it to power? You can watch the insane creation in motion below: Select a Model (optional)This life-sized compressed air car built from LEGO just won the internet What do you get when you combine crowdfunding, outside-the-box thinking, 18 months of hard work, and half a million LEGO pieces?
From the looks of it, you get to conquer the internet with a full-sized LEGO car, powered by compressed air.The Super Awesome Micro Project car, which was initially launched with a single tweet, is the brain child of an Australian entrepreneur, Steve Sammartino, and Romanian technology enthusiast, Raul Oaida, and can not only drive, but can get up to 18 mph.Anyone interested in investing $500-$1000 in a project which is awesome & a world first tweet me. Need about 20 participants... #startup— Steve Sammartino (@sammartino) February 29, 2012After receiving funding from 40 backers, the project was on, and over the next 18 months, the Super Awesome Micro Project came together in a fusion of ingenuity (and a whole lotta LEGO action).The LEGO car, which is powered by four orbital engines, using 256 pistons driven by compressed air, was built in Romania over a period of about a year, and then shipped to Melbourne, Australia, for its inaugural drive:While we probably won't be seeing too many other zero-emission rat rods built from LEGO on the roads anytime soon (perhaps because of the estimated cost of $60,000