Wind Power Beast-mode and this week’s new word: sprue

One recent weekday night, I sat down assembled the miniature Strandbeest shown above from a kit which I’d purchased a week or two earlier. Here’s a YouTube video about the same (or a very similar) kit. From what I can gather by browsing the official Strandbeest site and webstore, this beest appears to be an Animaris Ordis Parvus.

I’m also the proud owner of a working Mini Rhinoceros (aka Rhinoceros Parvus), built from a Japanese kit which I stumbled onto, a year or two back, in the Japanese bookshop near the top of Sogo in Causeway Bay.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of putting the mini-Strandbeest together was wedging the white silicone rubber feet into the lower-leg bits. That was the first step in the instructions and I’d gotten a few done when I paused to take the preceding snapshot.

Finished!

According to the directions in the kit’s box, I should’ve used one of the 1mm-diameter metal axles to wodge the feet into their receptacles on the bottoms of the beest’s legs, but my thumbnail wound up being sufficient. The side-cutters or side-snips in the middle photo are there because the kit’s manufacturer suggested using them to snip the model’s injection molded components out of their sprue. In practice, the parts were easily and safely twisted free directly by yours truly’s fingers.

Interestingly, it was while looking around for evidence that side cutters actually are used in the real world in these situations (yes, as it turns out) that I first encountered the word sprue.