Leonardo Da Vinci's Machines

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous painters and inventors of the Italian Renaissance, known all over the world thanks in particular to the Mona Lisa: the painting created by the master and now preserved in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Leonardo was also a great inventor, however, with a fervent imagination and ahead of his time. Among its machines, flying machines have particular importance ... modern flight studies, for the aerodynamic laws applied, even today.

In this model I have included the scale reproductions of four of his main creations.

The swivel crane was designed by Leonardo to speed up work in the Milanese Sforza building, but never built. The crane, which rests on a cylindrical base, could rotate thanks to a series of pins and gear wheels. At the rear Leonardo had added a balancing weight, to prevent it from overturning.

The Lego brick reproduction does not have the entire gears inside for obvious reasons of space, but faithfully reproduces its shape and proportions.

Leonardo was also a great military genius. Working always under the Sforza he created the model of a possible swivel tank that should have had a devastating effect on the opposing army. The solid wooden roof and the lookout tower would have allowed the cart to pass undisturbed. The idea was never put into practice due to the exorbitant costs and the obvious problems, such as the difficulty of transporting it on the slopes of mountains and hills

The automatic excavator is one of Leonardo's lesser known but most important creations: the principles that made the work work were at the forefront of time; an imposing system of pulleys tied to a rear weight allowed the blade to move towards the base which then returned by inertia.

Also in this case the machine was never built, this will for the strong diffidence towards the project of the Milanese nobles. Leonardo had created a perfectly adequate machine not for the 14000, but for the 1600/700, two hundred years of subsequent studies and discoveries

Leonardo had an almost morbid curiosity in flight, the desire to explore the only part of the known world where man was not the master. His studies on flight were inspired by the wings of bats and copied their slender and thin structure. The wingspan reached ten meters from left to right and the man lay down on a wooden structure between the wings.

Leonardo knew that flying was almost impossible: his intent was to create mostly a hang glider, with which to descend slowly from above and thus experience the thrill of flight.

Color: Dark brown, Medium brown, Fabuland brown, Dark gray, Light gray, Black, Aqua green.

Pieces: 1025 in total