Matchstick men and matchstick stagecoaches

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Man builds stagecoach from millions of toothpicks
It took thousands of hours and bucket-loads of patience but a model maker created a life-size stagecoach from 1.5million toothpicks.

Terry Woodling spent 15 years creating the Wells Fargo replica using wooden sticks and glue. Known as Mr Toothpick, he made models for years but this was his most ambitious project. It cost him more than £700 but the model was bought for £80,000 by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

‘I never kept track of the hours I spent working on it, only the years,’ said the 72-year-old from Warsaw, Indiana.

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No horse? Load of rubbish!

[SpursFan1902]

That's quite a profit margin!

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Tiny city of skyscrapers built out of staples
4th May 2010

Gleaming silver skyscrapers dominate the skyline of this city - but this impressive metropolis is made of tiny stacks of staples. Artist Peter Root created his urban sprawl by carefully placing 100,000 pieces of the tiny office stationery in building-like stacks.

Called Ephemicropolis, it took him 40 hours to make the 20ft by 10ft work on the floor of Northern Trust atrium in Guernsey. The part-time lecturer broke the stacks into sizes varying from full stacks of about five inches high down to single staples. And, unsurprisingly, having a steady hand was important.

'As the stacks are free-standing and very close together, the obvious challenge was not to knock them over,' says Peter. 'To build the more dense sections of the work took several hours and, on a couple of occasions, gravity demonstrated its severe lack of sympathy by undoing this work in milliseconds.'