Lego mechs

One of the things that rekindled my interest in Lego is seeing pictures of huge, crazy mechs people have built with Lego. You guys want to see some inspirato?

I'm talking about mechs like this one, built by flickr user zane_houston:

Or this guy by flickr user kwi-chang:

Or this guy by flickr user legoloverman:

This guy also has a tone of awesome retro classic Space stuff on his stream (but that's a Lego post for another day!) Side note: this build is going to be an official Lego set, thanks to Cuusoo. I have mixed feelings about Cuusoo, but I think it's really awesome for pushing offical Lego sets forward. This also sounds like a Lego post for another day.

 I've always wanted to start building mechs of my own, but have held off partly because I don't really consider myself a great builder, and I've been intimidated by awesome designs like these. I've also held off because most of the mech designs use Technic pieces for their underlying structure and GODDAMN, do I ever hate Technic pieces.

You can build mechs without using ball joints, and people certainly do this thing, but I am not clever enough to repurpose hinge pieces to achieve a similar effect.

Long story short: Technic pieces don't feel like Lego pieces to me, and I don't like their design. Still, official Lego sets (especially larger ships and vehicles) often use Technic pieces for underlying structure, so that's what I'm doing.

I picked up a couple small Ninjago sets today because the sets had some useful-looking ball joint pieces and started working on this thing when I got home:

I'm imagining it will be a heavily armored spider mech thing. I've lifted the cockpit entirely from one of the Galaxy Squad sets I got for Christmas, and it's just a placeholder for now. I plan to build a vertical cockpit, so you can see the minifig pilot more easily.

I spent most of my time working on the gun, and while I'm not super happy with it, it's a pretty good first draft:

The ammo drum feels overengineered, but I like the idea so far.

The ball joints I got from the Ninjago sets (you can see them making up most of the legs here) were a good start, but still not quite what I want. They're too long for my purposes, too inflexible and too hard to build around, so I put in a couple of Bricklink orders for some ball joints that typically come with the Hero Factory sets.

I've never been a fan of Hero Factory, since it's the new Bionicle and I hate Bionicle (for many of the same reasons I don't like Technic pieces in general) but those BALL JOINTS, man.

Pretty exciting! I've been wanting to start working on crazy mech designs for a while, and this has been a lot of fun.