Want to climb a wall like Spiderman? No problem – just whip up a climbing rig with microwave oven transformers. And find a steel building. And rewrite the canon so that Peter Parker is bitten by an electromagnetic spider instead of a radioactive one.
Back in the reality-based world, you’d probably be taking you life in your hands if you use [Make It Extreme]’s rig to get more than a dozen feet above the ground. The basics are pretty sound, but the devil is in the details. Four MOTs are cut and stripped of their secondary coils and attached to fixtures for the feet and hands. A backpack full of gel cell batteries powers the rig, and simple normally closed switches in the handholds control both the foot and hand magnets on a side. A click of a switch releases the magnets on one side, allowing the climber to reach up.
And therein lies our safety beef: what happens when you make a mistake and push both buttons at the same time? Seems like this build is screaming for some control circuitry that prevents this most obvious failure mode. We’re not ones to throw an Arduino at every problem, but in this case it may make sense, especially when it could monitor your time left before cratering the charge remaining in the battery pack.
Still, like most dangerous stunts, this looks really cool. If you’ve got any ideas for improvements in the controls, leave them in the comments below. And if you’re interested in transforming yourself into a superhero, learn from a guy who’s actually doing it – our own [James Hobson]. Check out some of his builds, like the Captain America shield or his car-lifting exoskeleton.
