Subject:
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Re: Shrieking Shack one-piece hut?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.harrypotter
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Date:
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Fri, 27 Feb 2004 18:29:18 GMT
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Viewed:
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4594 times
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In lugnet.harrypotter, Jason J. Railton wrote:
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Maybe you press the top in, and a compartment inside rotates to swap one
minifig for another.
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That’s exactly what it does. You’re supposed to just slap the thing down over
top of the chosen minifig, press the button, quickly lift the shack away, and
leave the other minifig/dog/whatever standing exactly where the original minifig
was. It works a bit better in theory than in practice, though. The first
problem is accurately getting the minifig into the bottom hole to begin with,
which you basically have to do blind. The second problem is that the minifig in
the other half of the chamber has likely fallen over by this time, and will not
be standing up when you remove the shack. The third problem is that between the
other two problems, it’s actually a lot faster to just swap them out by hand
instead of using the shack. Kids will probably adore it, though.
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It’s a bit weak not making something out of bricks though.
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I don’t see how this mechanism would have been feasible if it was completely
brick built. One problem you’d have is that the button is spring-loaded so it
will pop back up. You’re looking at having to include loose springs, TECHNIC
shocks, or a self-contained button section. The first one is possibly a safety
hazard (if they can’t make spring-loaded cannons anymore...), the second will
necessarily make it a lot taller, and the third one doesn’t make much sense when
you could just go all the way and make a completely self-contained switching
mechanism...like they did. Next, in order to guarantee that the minifigs can’t
get stuck in the corners, you have to build a completely round interior.
Granted, they now have 4x4 macaroni bricks, but you’d still be looking at a
complete assembly that’s 10x10 to get a square exterior, whereas this is 8x8 and
a lot easier for small hands to manipulate. Moving on from there, you have the
interior separator wall. Doing a standard brick-built design would work best
with a 2-stud thick wall, since it would completely cover the 2x2 turntable that
you’d have to put in the bottom, but then you run into the problem that a 2x6
won’t quite fit inside a chamber formed of 4x4 macaroni bricks unless you round
off the corners. The other option is to go with a thin wall that won’t have
interference issues, but then you’d still be looking at having a lip inside the
open section that was nearly 1 stud wide, where you can see they essentially
have none in the version shown. Compound this with the fact that you’d need to
either make a custom baseplate, or you’d have to build your baseplate from
regular plates, mount a turntable to the top of the plate in the center, and
fill in around it with tiles...and now you’ve at least doubled the height of the
floor that the minifig gets swept up onto, thereby increasing the likelihood
that the poor minifig’s feet will get jammed between the floor and the rotating
wall, and quite possibly end up damaging something. On top of all of this,
building it from a bunch of bricks decreases the structural integrity of the
entire design, making it more likely that an over-eager child will end up
collapsing or bursting it when trying to activate the switching mechanism.
Would you still prefer to see a brick-built version?
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Shrieking Shack one-piece hut?
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| (...) I wondered if it was something to make the shack move on its foundations. That picture suggests its like a giant version of the mechanism in a retractable biro though. Maybe you press the top in, and a compartment inside rotates to swap one (...) (21 years ago, 27-Feb-04, to lugnet.harrypotter, FTX)
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