Pup-ular Mechanics
Simone Giertz’s three-legged dog Scraps has long dreamed of surfing the sidewalk, but was unable until she got an electric LEGO skateboard.
As a quick scroll through your social media feed will clearly tell you, dogs are natural-born skateboarders. From the moment a dog first gets its paws on a sweet new deck it will be hooked. In no time at all that pupper will be nailing some gnarly kickflips, grinds, and ollies. Or at least most pooches will.
But Scraps, Simone Giertz’s dog, is unable to skateboard because she is missing one of her hind legs. And watching all of the other neighborhood dogs shredding has really got Scraps feeling down. It is hard not to feel bad for Scraps. After all, what dignity does a dog have without some wheels? It is like an elf that doesn’t want to make toys!
This great wrong could not be allowed to stand, so Giertz did the most obvious thing — she got together a bunch of LEGO Technic parts and some kids to tell her how to use them. Scraps might not be able to push with her legs, but that is nothing that a good old-fashioned electric LEGO skateboard couldn’t fix.
After consulting with kids from a local robotics club, Giertz came up with a design that would allow Scraps to steer, while motors (remotely controlled by Giertz) would drive the board forward. The board itself was a pretty simple build consisting of a flat surface with some reinforcement to help it bear Scraps’ weight. This was attached to wheels driven by LEGO motors so that Scraps would finally be able to feel the breeze in her fur.
The steering mechanism proved to be the most challenging part of the entire build. A pair of foot… err… paw pedals were added to the top of the board to turn the front wheels left or right. But the connection between the pedals and the wheel assembly was not entirely straightforward. After a mere 2 or 3 (or 50, but who’s counting?) rebuilds — and a little cheating by looking at other people’s solutions on the internet — a solid mechanism was finally put in place.
After all of that effort, Scraps was ready to go. She hopped on the board ready to really live for the first time. It was as if her entire life had been leading up to this very moment. Then Giertz hit the power and… nothing! I think it is safe to say no greater tragedy has been told of since Sophocles’ telling of Oedipus Rex.
All was lost. The dream was over for Scraps. Nothing could possibly be done. Well, aside from adding some more motors, anyway. So Giertz went ahead with that option instead of ruining her dog’s entire life forever and ever. With the extra power, Scraps was surfing the sidewalks like she had always dreamed of doing. If you ever happen to be out on a warm summer’s evening and hear a gleeful howl mixed with the whir of an electric motor as something streaks past, you may have just encountered the world’s happiest skateboarding dog.