Man Attempts to Build Giant Mechanical Hexapod Spider

James Hobson of The Hacksmith attempted to build a giant mechanical spider called “the world’s largest rideable hexapod”.

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.

The idea came to Hobson when he watched a video of a towable excavator in action, noting how the rig operated. He then thought about how it could be made better with more legs.

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?

The project was ambitious from the start. Unfortunately, it was too big to function correctly.

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.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

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