Shoe's 30 for 30, day 27: windmill

As I'm running out of days in this challenge I decided to do something interesting.  That was almost a mistake as it turned out.  I don't think this is my best work but I learned a ton on the way.  I had three goals:

1. make the thing stand straight
2. slightly taper the walls better than on day 12.  
3. add at least one playable floor

The vanes (?) are made of coffee stirrers and toothpicks wood glued together.  I'm not even sure why I have wood glue or when I might have bought it but I do.  Because I didn't trust my ability to build working mechanisms in foam and toothpicks I sacrificed a handful of Lego bricks on this build.  As a result, the whole thing does rotate though it isn't quite tall enough despite all my measuring.

The first goal kind of worked itself out.  There isn't any special counter weighting in the structure as the blades ended up being pretty light.  So we got that one for free.

The second goal was realized by making a guide and working mainly with PVA.  You can see my guide on the right in one of those shots, and yes, I build a lot of tools out of Lego.  I knew the height was going to be right around four inches for the walls and had a good beginning and ending width.  I didn't do math on the slope, really, I just worked with the Lego until I got what I wanted.

The base of the building contains a round-ish slab of XPS.  I don't have a circle cutting jig (it hasn't come up often enough to build one yet) so I traced this one out with a compass Pringles can and cut it out with my trusty wrong-handed OLFA knife.  This time around I drew the cobbles on the floor rather than using a textured rolling pin.  I felt like this was a small space and I wanted to have a circular pattern.  This completed the third goal.

The walls are pretty much what you'd expect and dipped into the billionty extra bricks I milled for day 12.  That build was supposed to be a heck of a lot taller but I got bored with it so I have lots sitting around.  Despite carving every stinking brick to shape there were still really big gaps but a lot fewer than last time.  I filled those again with the myriad random chips leftover from carving them.

This one was spendier than I expected and there were more than a few moments that I didn't think I was going to make it.  I'm glad i followed through with it since I think it looks pretty good but carving every brick and every shingle really sucked.  I still like the idea of building structures out of bricks but I think this build has steered me away from round structures built out of bricks.  Tomorrow should be an uninteresting painting job and maybe getting started on day 29's build.