The Dark Tower - (Spiral) Stairway to Heaven

WARNING: This post may contain spoilers from Stephen King's The Dark Tower (series of books).

Creating the spiral staircase of the Dark Tower has probably been the most challenging aspect of this project.

My initial idea was to create a smaller inner section that represented the spiral staircase and have doorways to take Roland into the various rooms and levels of the Dark Tower, but I found that while this would probably have been more faithful to the book, it just wasn't practical; there would be no good way to really physically move LEGO minifigures through the small spiral staircase, and it would be hard to photograph/etc.



So I eventually settled on a few sets of winding staircases and bigger hallways and rooms that you can see in the picture above.

On first glance, it is an easy detail to overlook, but in truth, figuring out how to create the right angles as well as have reasonable stability (so that the staircase doesn't fall apart by simply touching it) was quite challenging.



It starts with the simple concept of Angled Walls that I learnt from a great post on Eurobricks.com.

The idea is that you don't have to place a LEGO piece directly on every stud beneath it. As long as the LEGO piece has room to turn, there are certain points and angles where you can comfortably place a piece at a diagonal angle in an imaginary rectangle or square.

Further more, you can get more interesting angles by using Jumper plates to allow you to count studs by a half measure instead of a full measure.

I used this technique to create the spiral staircase in the Dark Tower.



Using tile pieces to cover studs, and filler pieces (pictured in red and orange) to ensure that there were no empty spaces that the plates could squeeze into (thus causing instability and the staircase falling apart), I was able to come up with two different sets of staircases that make the interior of the Dark Tower come to life.

Notice how the steps pictured above are slightly narrower than those pictured below (and in the rest of the post).



A lot of this, for me anyway, has to do with experimentation. While I do like crunching the numbers in some cases, it simply doesn't help to keep those numbers in a vacuum. You could envision one thing in your mind, but the actual requirements of a build in the actual environment can make you rewrite all your formulas.

Last night, for example, I made a breakthrough.





I found out that by simply shifting a couple pieces around (see above for picture comparisons), I was able to maintain the same angle, but have a much more stable staircase. The former would pop out every once in awhile if pressure wasn't appropriately applied, but the latter sits tight.

I can only imagine that I'll have to keep experimenting and coming up with new angles as the Dark Tower grows higher and closer to completion.