It's not the complexity of the part, it's the process that I am exploring.

I wanted to compare how I would create a part in maya as apposed to the way Andrew did it in modo. He created a ring of faces around the vertical piece, separated it, then used one of the coolest features in modo (the background constraint object) to just push it against the horizontal piece. At the time I thought it allowed more control than maya but after building it I feel I can achieve as good a result using booleans in maya (and faster too).

Creating complex compound shapes with highly controlled edges is what I find challenging about hard surface modeling. I think hard surface modeling is much more challenging then organic, especially with tools like zbrush now for digital sculptors.

I like both inorganic (hard surface) and organic modeling though.

But anyway this is more a diversion, I am more interested in learning to texture lately and I just needed to take a short break. I watched the modo video and I liked the approach Andrew took with the way he constructed some of the parts in the demo. I just wanted to recreate some of them in maya.

Then I started thinking this kind of stuff might help someone just learing maya. I would have loved to have seen stuff like this when I was just learning.

The piston was just the first one. I am going to recreate the entire foot section so there will be more coming. In fact, I have a itch to model the entire mech in maya.

Oh it it actually took about 5 minutes to make (lol). Sure you could just stuff two components into one another and combine them and 90% of the time you'd never notice.