‘Tis the season for giving, as they say around this time of year. YouTuber and genius LEGO builder JK Brickworks is doing his part by giving us ideas for incredible things to do with everybody’s favorite buildable bricks. One of which is the below tree-topping LEGO star that actually “twinkles” thanks to the use of Technic motors.
JK Brickworks, a.k.a. Jason Alleman, recently posted the above video tutorial to his YouTube channel. The legendary builder—who’s behind many brilliant motorized LEGO sculptures—said in a blog post that he created the star for this year’s Build To Give campaign. The effort from LEGO invites people to build and share festive LEGO stars on social media. (For every star shared on social media with the hashtag #BuildToGive, LEGO will donate a set to a child in need.)
Alleman’s star, expectedly, is clever, and crafted well enough to work as a retail set. In the build video above Alleman shows how he iterated his LEGO star design. While the video is silent, if you turn on the subtitles, the builder describes how he created his star. Toward the beginning, Alleman notes that he opted for an “elegant” look. He subsequently used many pieces from the Infinity Gauntlet set to make his simple star. Although simple is relative, as we doubt reimagining the set would be such a snap for us.
As Alleman notes his twinkling LEGO star has six points and, in its motorized form, uses six LEGO motors to move the ends of each point in and out in an alternating pattern. The result is a star that does indeed look like it’s twinkling. At least in a playful, plastic way. Also, with enough boozy eggnog, anything will look like it’s really twinkling!
Along with video of this awesome twinkling LEGO, and inspiration to post a star for #BuildToGive, Alleman also gives people one more thing this holiday season: instructions showing how to build the twinkling tree topper. If we could ask Santa for anything related to LEGO from the builder, however, it’d be a retail version of his functional particle accelerator. That could happen if we stay off the naughty list and do our part to crowdfund the project.
