Flickr member/Artist/Legologist Carl Merriam loves making functional sculptures out of his favorite medium. Take this microscope for instance. It’s not high tech enough for CSI: Legoland, but it does have a magnifying glass inside and working focus knobs.
Merriam thought of making a microscope when he realized that his X-Pod looked like a Petri dish.
He didn’t provide a detailed breakdown or how-to, but he did say, “I used a planetary gear system to allow both coarse and fine adjustment of the objective “lens”. A little more tinkering and I connected the focus to a magnifying glass and fiber optic light in the eyepiece, so adjusting the focus knobs would actually bring the writing on a LEGO stud in and out of focus.”
I guess this is an Imperial microscope. Check out Merriam’s Flickr page or his blog for more of his builds. And yes, someone’s already built a working LEGO telescope.
[via Doobybrain]