LEGO can make almost anything, including aircraft and boats, but you know how is it with LEGO aircrafts and boats. They may have the form, but they won’t fly or actually sail, let alone submerge in the case of submarines. Or so we thought. As it turns out, one of our favorite YouTube tinkerer Peter Sripol managed to make a flying LEGO aircraft a few years back.
Now, we hear Adam Woodworth, the man behind the giant flying LEGO helicopter and LEGO airplane, has actually made a couple of real LEGO submarines. As in, the submarines were from actual LEGO sets and for the first time, actually sail under water. Seriously, how cool is that? That was like a childhood dream come true for kids who had like the Aquanuats sets and only to be disappointed that the submarines can’t transverse the underwater world of your bathtub or pool.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I first got these Aquanauts sets in 1996. Both subs are built out of real LEGO from the original sets. The only glue used was to attach the drive motors, and I used hot-melt glue for that, so that I could easily return the sets to their spots in my collection. Both use the internals from a 3-channel sub toy I found on Amazon. I removed the electronics, potted everything in hot-melt glue to waterproof, then extended motor leads as necessary to get things in the right positions. One big challenge with this was getting consistent neutral buoyancy. Every connection between bricks trapped tiny pockets of air, and getting repeatable flooding was challenging, often times I would have to disassemble and reassemble parts of the set under water to get the balance correct.”
Unfortunately, Woodworth’s build is not something you can buy. As a consolation, you can see the submarines from the Aquanauts sets gliding through the water gracefully in the video below.
Images: YouTube (ajw61185).
