November 13, 2025
Amy gave Martin a pretty difficult present a while ago. It’s a WOODEN City Kinetic Picture. Martin actually started the build on October 21, 2025 and finished it today. There are only 185 pieces, and, thank goodness it’s only rated at medium difficulty. Martin does not want to attempt a really hard one, like their 3D Locomotive!
A time lapse of this model’s assembly couldn’t be done because most of the assembly wasn’t done in a fixed base, but as individual assemblies.
Here’s what you start from. 6 sheets of extremely high quality birch plywood, with each piece almost cut out with an extremely high precision laser. Almost, you ask? Yep, to make sure the pieces stay in the sheets until you need them, they leave tiny little pieces uncut. You have to punch the pieces out.
They even provide a tool for punching out the pieces! The two tabs at the right side let you punch out even the very smallest feature on a piece. The Roman Numeral labeled slots are for setting axels to various depths. The small holes help to push toothpicks in.
Here are the 10 subassemblies. Martin got the last of these done on November 10, 2025. Each is placed on the part of the instruction sheet which described how to assemble it. The very complicated subassembly with the thread attached to it is the ratchet that holds tension on the rubber band motor. How it worked was quite a mystery, since there isn’t anything obvious to wind the thread around.
Martin was expecting a spool of some sort?!?!
It’s now November 12, 2025 and, while it’s not completely assembled, it will run. The mystery of the thread spool is solved! They wanted as much mechanical advantage as possible for the rubber band motor, so they used the axel itself as the spool!
And its completely done today! Martin had to put the start-stop mechanism together and the last of the frame pieces as well. This was shot using the tripod.