Limbo Hop

The brief

Limbohop was an “out of the blue” idea of ours. It could be described as a close cousin to swing-ball, as it involves one or more players having active fun around a central pole, with an arm that swings round and gets progressively lower. We made a very rough mock and found it to be really fun and energetic. It also presented a surprise twist- when to stop “limboing” (most of us duck) and start hopping (most of us jump) over the bar.

The bang

The challenge was the speed of the bar. As it got lower and lower it would get faster and faster, too fast for some. When the bar reached the bottom, we needed to make it easy to rise to the top again. Our solution was an engineered carriage that housed two pins that could be retracted. These pins traveled down a spiral which varied in pitch. We maintained a constant speed which tested really well and was taken in by a number of toy companies, who turned it down on cost.

The result

Not to be deterred we went about engineering it and fine tuning it. The big changes came in making the pole of three parts out of the same tool with the same pitch. This took some experimentation and was done by our friends Worlds Apart who took on the licence and helped with the final engineering and design and made it into an all year-round toy.