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.
