WINDSOR COUNTY, Vermont — To get to Jaimie Mantzel’s home you’ll need your hiking shoes. He lives deep in the New England wilderness, beyond a grassy field, past a concrete tunnel, a pond and deep forest. Near the end of the journey, you hang on to a rope to hoist yourself up a steep hill. And there it is: a colony of hand-built structures clustered around a four-story-high geodesic dome in the middle of a verdant clearing — a cross between Tolkien’s Middle-earth and a science fiction robot fantasy.
There’s a lumber mill — also built from scratch — that Mantzel uses to make his own wooden planks from the trees that dot the landscape, a smaller geodesic dome that houses a spring for water, and a large workshop called the “Banana Building.” That’s where Mantzel keeps his giant six-legged robot.
“I’m fully aware that I’m a robot-building nerd, hippie, whatever,” he says, laughing. “But you know, if I’m going to be a nerd, I may as well be a cool one. Or do my best.”
Mantzel is an inventor, a recluse, and probably the internet’s most popular toymaker. The Giant Robot Project is his masterpiece — a massive, spider-like walking androids he fashioned out of steel and aluminum. The formidable six-legged beast is 12 feet high and big enough to drive like a car. The robot went viral online last year, with a YouTube video that garnered more than 2 million hits in three days, and Mantzel documented the project in nearly 100 other YouTube clips. Now, Mantzel is on the brink of bringing his robots to the world, designing a series of miniature versions for the UK toy company Wow! Stuff.
He supports himself, his partner and their two small children on about $5,000 a year — income derived mostly from a share of the ads on his YouTube videos, which garner $10 or more a day, and royalties from robotics projects. The family’s expenses are minimal — there’s no rent or utility bills, and they cook all their own meals. Three solar panels on his roof power a Mac laptop, a 3-D printer and a few 5-watt halogen bulbs. An old wood stove on the first floor provides heat.
While we talk, the 3-D printer stamps out a robot foot. Mantzel is animated and restless; he prefers to sit on the rough-hewn floor — surrounded by crawling bots — because he doesn’t like furniture. Many people ask him if living off the grid is challenging, and he shrugs it off.
“It’s a challenge realizing how awesome it is every morning,” he says. “That’s about it. It’s kind of funny. A lot of times people have these ideas that it’s somehow more difficult, that life is harder or something…. My life is a lot more fun and interesting. I wouldn’t say it’s easier. I do have to go out and cut firewood to put in the wood stove in the winter, but I don’t have to do some job I hate to pay for a utility to heat my house. So it’s a tradeoff, and I happen to like this way a lot more. In the city you pay a lot of other people to do stuff, and here you just do it yourself. And I’d rather just do it myself.”
“I want to build a solar-powered amphibious RV that I can drive around in.” —Jaimie Mantzel
He began building robots out of popsicle sticks and coat hangers as a child growing up in Ontario. “The first thing I built that was sort of difficult was a pair of walking legs,” he recalls. “I was told a lot, ‘You can’t build that! It’s impossible!’ and I thought, ‘Well, I can build that!’ … and it worked perfectly. I thought, ‘Wow, that was cool!’ Then I started building more complex things.”
He attended Brown University, majoring in art instead of engineering because “the sculpture classes let me build robots and left me alone.” Soon after graduating in 1999, Mantzel moved to the Vermont woods and purchased 22.5 acres of land for a song. He has been living here for nearly 10 years, building an array of inventive walking machines, robotic toys and other odd devices. He had never built a house before building the giant dome he lives in.
“I learned from Lego,” he says. “And building forts. Yeah, basically that’s all it is. I did renovations on a few houses; just minor things, before building this.”
He fires up an “attacknid” — the first installment in the “Combat Creatures” series he’s currently working on for Wow! Stuff. The six-legged attacknid can shoot neoprene discs at a distance of up to 30 feet — a rugged, insectlike creature designed for battle.
Richard North, CEO of Wow! Stuff, said he anticipates that the Attacknid, which will soon appear in major stores across the U.S., will be a “global bestseller” next year.
Top: Jaimie Mantzel’s design for a toy dart blaster. Bottom: Mantzel’s 3-D template for a miniature version of his giant robot spider.
“Jaimie is an absolute inspiration to work with, and I honestly believe the word ‘genius’ was created to describe the talents that Jaimie possesses,” said North in an e-mail to Wired. “An extraordinary character. Plus he taught me how to swim, but that’s another story.”
“I’m basically a big 8-year-old kid,” Mantzel says with a grin, as he takes Wired up to the third floor of his dome. The entire third floor is a giant trampoline.
Mantzel receives fan mail several times a week, much of it from teachers and kids who have stumbled across his videos or through the voluminous materials on his website — a “big jumbly scrapbook,” he says, of all his creative projects over the years. These days, the Giant Robot Project collects dust in the Banana Building while he builds his miniature robot toys.
Jaimie and his daughter Aurora, 2, rest on the third-floor trampoline Jaimie installed a few years ago. John Tully/Wired
He’s also working on a videogame based on the tenets of a group he started called the Adventure Builders Club. “It’s not a club that has meetings or anything; it’s more a club of individuals, a club of a way of thinking,” he says. The credo for the group — based on a list of eight guiding virtues, like love and honesty, is loosely based on the classic RPG Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar, released in 1985.
“It’s one of those rare instances where a videogame comes out with something really positive and well thought out, on how to live life,” he says. “So I want to do something kind of like that.”
Jaimie Mantzel works on a piece of his giant robot in his homemade workshop. Mantzel began his Giant Robot Project in 2007. The robot is 10 to 12 feet high, and made of scrap metal and aluminum. John Tully/Wired
8 Principles of the ‘Adventure Builders Club’
1 Strength
2 Courage
3 Love
4 Imagination
5 Honesty
6 Honor
7 Life
8 Humility
A cheerful yellow Adventure Builders Club logo adorns his T-shirt and the exterior of his dome. It’s a skull and crossbones — but with a happy face for a skull, and a wrench and hammer for the crossbones.
“It’s not really subversive, but sort of an alternative way of thinking to be an adventure builder in current society,” he says. “It’s sort of like being a pirate except without all the murdering and stealing. The hammer sort of represents the body, the wrench represents the mind, and the happy face represents the spirit.”
Mantzel says he likes to learn by building things. A few scattered robotics textbooks lay around the dome, but he hasn’t read them. “I’ll read something to find out the melting temperature of steel, if I need to melt some steel,” he says. “Or more accurately, what color steel is when you’re tempering it — so you know what heat to get it up to. Or what glue to use on what plastic. Things like that. But I don’t really want to read long, drawn-out things about the subject that I’m doing.”
Mantzel has his sights set on more fanciful and ambitious projects in the near future.
“I want to build a solar-powered amphibious RV that I can drive around in,” he says excitedly. “If I really wanted to go somewhere and not have to deal with electricity, I could just drive into the water and deploy the pontoons and everything, and it would transform into a big sailboat.”
His other ideas for future projects are no less involved — building a sun-powered robot factory; buying an island, where he would set up his own small colony of like-minded individuals; and constructing a powered suit, “sort of like Iron Man, except without the flying, and not so flashy,” he says.
“It would lift really heavy stuff when you want to lift really heavy stuff,” he explains. “Basically, you get in it and you’re like the Hulk … but I would want to use it to build things, rather than destroy them.”
The projects seem difficult, but he dismisses the idea that anything is hard.
“All of this stuff isn’t hard if you just relax, take a deep breath, and think about what you’re doing,” he says.
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