​Welcome to DIY Walkers, a site for enthusiasts and educators to collaborate on building mechanical walkers, from LEGO-scale, to SUV-scale

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Although the principles for building walkers are the same at both scales, the benefit of scaling up is how it magnifies issues with designs, providing feedback for fine tuning that is not available at LEGO-scale.
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TrotBot
​Welcome to DIYWalkers!  I'm Ben Vagle,  and I've been building mechanical walkers since I was 11 years old.  I started DIYwalkers to share what I've learned, and to collaborate with you. ​ Let's see if we can take walkers to the next level, and more importantly, help to inspire students to learn the skills necessary to design and build these tricky beasts!

I started by building Klann's amazingly robust Mechanical Spider, Jansen's majestic Strandbeest and our own TrotBot and Strider in LEGO, and then I was a member of the team that scaled up TrotBot in my garage.

I'll kick off DIYwalkers with a few posts on Mechanical Walker basics, as well as building instructions for making highly functional LEGO-scale walkers, based on the same principles used for building large walkers.  I invite you to participate on DIY Walkers by sharing your builds or insights on the blog, or if you want to contribute more detailed posts on this site just send us an email.

Thanks for your interest and we look forward to hearing from you!
Ben
Ben@DIYwalkers.com

The guys at the Weather Channel's awesome Rockets Are Cool made this video of some of our walkers.


​© Ben Vagle, Wade Vagle and DIYwalkers.com, 2016-2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s authors and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to DIYwalkers.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 
​Contact:  Wade@TeamTrotBot.com