Posted 06.30.2010 at 4:36 pm
14 Comments
Meet your friendly neighborhood Spider-Kid! It's the stuff of childhood dreams, right? A boy in Cambridge, England, can climb the walls just like his favorite superhero.
OK, Vacuum-Boy's powers are slightly less subtle than Peter Parker's. But you have to love 13-year-old Hibiki Kono's creativity. He spent five months designing and building his Spider-Man gear from a pair of cheap 1,400-watt vacuums bought at Tesco (like a British Wal-Mart) and some suction pads.
The British press quotes Hibiki saying he used to dress up as Spider-Man when he was younger and he loves all the movies: "It's great to be able to climb walls like him."
Vacuum-backpack whirring, Hibiki picks his way along a brick wall, blue crash pad below. He says he would go higher but his instructors won't let him. As for his mother, she thinks it's brilliant, he says. "But she won't let me use it in my bedroom as she's worried I may pull down the ceiling," the Sun quotes him saying.
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from neverland
Great kid and cool parents, allowing him to be so creative and develop that spider man stuff, straight from childhood dreams :)
With proper safety measures, it must be great fun, so when will commercial product hit the markets.
This is originally from Bang Goes the Theory. I recognize all the components, and it is an English show.
I see a Mythbusters REVISIT.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1qoINo2MPM&feature=channel
StephenD.Alverez is right. The Sun is still a nonsense after all! And I was thinking that maybe they deserved some due credit here...silly me. I think it's safe to say this kid didn't exactly design it.
I'm gonna keep ragging on Xspot. I swear man! It sounds like you type with downs syndrome! I don't even want to be insulting because sometimes your little quips are thought provoking but I'm always left filling in the blanks with your English! Hit me up man. Seriously.
I like this kid. With his "spider-man" devise and all. Honestly I wish I had that kind of support for my ideas as a child. Too many brothers I guess
You probably don't care but my brother's midget munchkin cat just tore twenty holes in my hands :'(
Bitch cat.
The kid's awesome, no doubt, but, "...a pair of cheap 1,400-watt vacuums?" That'll pull 25 amps, right? Anybody have any 110 volt, 25-amp receptacles in their houses?
Also, what's the business-end of a vacuum pad that sticks to a porous brick wall that sports tooled mortar joints look like? If Peter's mated the vac's to some kind of waffle-like pad and each cell of each "waffle" is isolated from the leaking cells over mortar joints and cracked bricks, then isn't that the bigger story?
Still, great job, Peter!
@roebling
Europe and almost everywhere except the US has 220 volt power plugs. I don't know what type of amperage they have over there though.
In UK we have a 240 volt system with each individual plug fused to 13 amps.
Each pad can support the full weight of the 13 year old boy that's about 100 pounds. So how does he break the suction of a pad before moving it. I cant see any release valves. The load on the pads is in shear , parallel to the wall surface. There must be a trick to lifting the pad of the wall. I suspect the shear force generated is greater than the perpendicular force because of the wall's friction. Perpendicular force is probably quite low and enough for him to just pluck them off at will.
That's a lot of work just to sneak out of his bedroom window.
Hibiki Kono?
English?
Hmmm.
Don't think so.
If an English person were in China, would they be considered to be Chinese?
I doubt it.
Rather absurd what passes for English this day and age.
If you aren't of Welsh, Irish, Scots or Anglo Saxon decent you aren't English.
The various British ethnicities are a unique and identifiable people.
Calling an Asian "English" denies the real English of an identity.
If it was the other way around (British child in Asian country being called Chinese or what have you) people would find it to be absurd.
@roebling:
There are a pair of vacuums -- therefore, he started with two plugs. He may have joined them -- or, plugged them into two different receptacles.
The totally pointless useless invention that make this world so cool! Soon no doubt it will be a $150 toy. Now, this is a toy that it going to have to pull more weight! Dont think I'm gonna let all the 10 year old have all the fun :D
This kids going to go a long way - prolly straight up!
Let him go up ^ - with an abseiling rope.