Priming torso and parts from Brad

Today was more of sanding and shooting another coat of primer on the torso. Then after more sanding and washing the torso, I applied several coats of Rustoleum hammered silver paint. After the first coat, I steel wooled the finish and applied the second coat. It looks great. But of course after the final coat is on, you start noticing a few things that you didn't see before. Not too bad.

While waiting for the first coat to dry, I took a ride to Brad's house to see his new robo-cop car and robo cop suit. They are exact replicas of the props used in the movie. Brad said a few cars almost went off the road gawking at him when he was driving it from Miami where he picked it up Friday.

Brad also sold me his robot arms, a few C3PO parts and several other props. And I borrowed a few of his B9 parts that I'm going to try to cast in resin. Since it takes so long to get parts from the club vendors, I may need to fabricate the rest of my parts and it's nice to have Brad's parts as a reference.

Tread belts and collar ribs

A very productive Day today. Spent a lot of time sandinding the torso and finally a wet sanding. I did this on and off all day until mid afternoon when I took the torso out in my driveway and thoroughly washed it and degreased it to prepare for the first coat of primer. After the torso was dried, the primer went on beautifully. Of course that's when you see areas that need some minor attention so I used my red spackling and went over the entire torso several times filling in pinholes and scratches.

Dad came over and had some good ideas how to do the treads using velcro. That way we can compensate if they stretch over time and they will come off and go on easily. He cut the armflex tape into 1" pieces and assembled one tread before he had to go home. I sprayed it with plasti-kote but wasn't too impressed with the results. After re-reading the directions on Mark Thompson's tread making, I realized I missed the step where you're supposed to put a paintable caulk on the edges. I'm not the greatest when it comes to reading directions so I'll just have to fix that tomorrow.

While Dad was working on the treads, I cut about 112 ribs for the collar. I used my table scroll saw and it cut the acrylic very easily. The only thing I had to do was exert outward pressure on both pieces just before the blade broke through so they would immediately separate. Otherwise they melt back together. Tomorrow I'll cut the circular pieces with my rotozip and circle attachment.

Lessons in bond

I'm filling the imperfections on the robot with bondo. Wow, if you put too much hardner in, it's hard as a rock in about 30 seconds !!! I won't say how I know. I think I put too much bondo on the robot in a few places which means lots of unnecessary sanding. I thought I learned that lesson many years ago while trying to do some body work on a car. I probably shouldn't have used bondo and just used that soft red filler because the spots that need filling aren't very deep

more axles

Just finished cutting axles and drilling the holes for the cotter keys

Axles and wheels

I had to go into work an hour late so I spent the extra hour in the morning sanding the tread section more. Then I dashed home at lunch and hit it with another coat of paint.

When I got home from work, I decided to hit it with another coat of paint before we went out to dinner. After dinner I fitted the wheels and cut some axles to size. I also laid in the armaflex tape to determine where I was going to put the treads.

The shocker came when I went to put the lower middle wheels in. They didn't fit because they hit the bottom plate. At first I thought I mis-read the plans but after sitting down and re-reading the plans I came to the conclusion that the middle bottom wheels were never intended to be installed with this design. My measurements and work was exactly as the plans instruct. Actually it makes sense as nobody can see those wheels and it would add to the weight of the treadbox. Another advantage is I can make small axles with the scrap from the four corner axles. The small axles are for the side wheels and this will save a few bucks as I didn't have enough of the long aluminum axles anyways.

Living life on the edge - cutting and drilling the torso

The (terrifying) challenge of today was drilling and cuttting the torso. I will admit I was very intimidated to cut the torso. Especially since Brad had a problem with his drill bit chipping his torso while drilling his chest buttons. But he told me what he did wrong so I was able to successfully cut all my holes and bezel square with his tips. He also loaned me the correct drill bits. His advice (which worked) was to lay the torso down and make sure your drill is centered correctly over the markings. Do not push down and gently but firmly hold the drill. We used Dennis Wilbur's template. His templates have crosshairs on them which show the exact center of all the holes. This allows you to perfectly center the drillbit. Brad's other suggestion was to get a hobby knife (x-acto) and score the areas you're going to cut so the gel coat and fiberglass don't shatter.

By the third hole, I loosened up and felt pretty confident. All the holes and the bezel opening turned out fine. Fortunately, that was all I had to cut since the torso I got from Mike Joyce already had the backplate area, arms and vents cut out.

Styrene to the tread section

Today we applied the styrene to the tread section with a 2 part epoxy. Dad Yvonne and I all worked the styrene when the epoxy was on because we used a fast drying (6 minutes) epoxy and time was of the essence.

If I could do it over, I would glue each curve seperately with a separate piece of styrene(4 pieces plus the middle). The way we did it was I cut a piece of styrene to go from one side to the other wrapping around the bottom of the tread section. Then we cut a smaller piece to go in between on the bottom piece. No matter how much we tried, it just doesn't line up this way. I had to do a lot of trimming and sanding afterward. Plus the epoxy didn't stick in all areas so I ran some construction adhesive in those areas. It was a lot more work than expected but it was in good shape by Sunday evening. Styrene is easy to work with. It sands nicely and is easy to trim.

It's amazing how many flaws you see after you paint. I just keep sanding and filling with that red automotive spackling. It looks better every day

Working on robot + beer = problems

Did some more patching and sanding the tread section. Lesson of the day .... don't work on the robot after having a beer. I decided to try to see how the wheels fit. Well I was distressed to see one of my outer support spacers was in the way of one of the wheels. My only option was to cut out the spacer, fill and sand the area it was in and then create a new spacer in the correct location. My first mistake was to use my rotozip to cut it out. I mangled it and made the filling and sanding job much worse. Worse yet ... and I really hate to admit this but I started cutting the wrong spacer !!! So that was another filling and sanding project I made for myself. Once it was all repaired and the new spacer in, I was happy again. You couldn't even tell all the repairs.

I figured out using 3/8" aluminum rod gave me enough room to thread the rod (axle) through the entire tread section and wheels easily. I was able to drill holes in the ends with my drill press for the cotter keys. I put a few aluminum wheels into the tread section and they looked great.

Around 8:00 pm a knock at the door from UPS ... The Styrene sheets arrived. Perfect timing.

Painting the tread section and knee plates

I'm researching alternative (cheaper) ways of fitting my robot with arms. A few creative ways have surfaced and Brad had an interesting idea of how to make arms. I'm waiting to hear back from some suppliers on alternative sources.

After work, I lightly sanded the primer I applied to the treadsection and knee plates. Then Yvonne and I applied some hammered silver to the tread section and knee plates. The paint looks pretty good. We only applied a few coats and called it quits.

Electric wheelchair parts

Brad told me about an electric wheelchair he saw at a resale shop so I checked it out when I was in the area. It was like his and I wasn't ready to modify my robot that much to make it move. But then I spied a smaller electric wheelchair in the corner with a single drive wheel. It needed a lot of work but it had a couple of 12v batteries with charger and the motor and drive looked like it would be usable. All for only $45.00. I also picked up some parts and robot arms from Brad to make templates for Brad using my torso. I also bought the rest of the paint I need to buy. I did a lot of running around at lunch today. I also stopped at Kinkos on the way to work to make a copy of my Robby the robot blueprints/poster for Brad.

After work, we painted more of the legs and knees and I primed the tread section and knee plates. I experimented and it looks to me like if you use the bumper paint for the areas that have been sprayed with plastidip it works better than the vinyl and fabric paint that was recommended. I wish I would have used this all along. My legs have the consistency of sandpaper and not that cool smooth look. I may have to redo them in the future.

I heard that several neighbors noticed my garage project and were having discussions whether or not it was robby robot or the B9 from lost in space.

After the painting, I proceeded to take apart the electric wheelchair. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.

Haste makes waste

I did a really stupid thing today. Before work, I had a few spare minutes and decided to start putting the zipper in. Before I knew it, I was rushing so I wouldn't be late for work (and I was) and my work was a mess. Panic set in and I even left a message on the B9 site asking about how many coats of plasti-dip you can use and what's good to fill in areas.

When I returned home from work, I decided to coat the zipper with plastidip first to see how it would look. I was surprised that the plasti-dip covered almost all the imperfections pretty good. The gaps under the zipper may not be too bad so for now I'm leaving it as is. I totally disassembled all pieces to get them ready for paint. Before it got dark, I was also able to spray on a couple coats of paint on the legs. My wife volunteered to finish spray painting tomorrow. She said she likes to spray paint and I'm not crazy about painting so that worked out good.

Attaching more pipe insulation

We attached the remaining leg pipe insulation today and it all fit like a glove. My spacers were right on. Plus we did good with not getting glue all over. Next step is the zipper and plasti-dip

Taking shape

Today was a very productive day and we did the first official stack. The morning started out peaceful enough and I sprayed the legs with a layer of plasti-dip. I also spent some more time sanding and preparing my treadbox for paint. I attached the 2 top knee plates and knee sections to the treadsection with four large lag screws that I had. In the future I may need to switch these out for bolts but they worked great.

The next step was to attach both leg sections to the waist pieces with spacers. I did the overkill method again (like in the legs) and for each stack I used 4 (1/4) 3" bolts inside my pvc spacers. The spacers are all 1.25".

The way I attached the legs and waist to the top knee plates was to run 4 1/2" threaded rods (24") from the treadbox with two through each leg. I had that solid piece of wood I added to my treadbox that these bolted into nicely. I created 2 wooden crossbars that I slid over the rods that tightened down against the first waist piece to hold that section into place. I spent a lot of time pondering how to do this and I'm very happy with the final result.

A problem with the plans I have is the fifth piece of the waist section has a big circle in the middle that I cut out. By doing that, there's no easy way to attach it to the donut and piece under the donut. So what I did was cut two strips of 1" thick wood by about 3" wide and screw them into the fifth waist piece. Now I had a solid area to put 4 bolts to attach the torso to the waist.

Dad came over for a couple of hours and we got a great picture of us after we set the torso on top. Now it's beginning to look like a robot. Tomorrow I'll get my patient wife to help me with gluing the other pipe insulation pieces.

Finishing knees and spacing legs

The knees were sanded a little more and bumper rubber paint was applied to them.

It took a lot longer than 10 minutes to dry so I brought them into the house where it was cooler (too much heat and humidity in Florida). After they dried, I sprayed some paint on them and when that dried, I sanded them a little more. They'll need some more paint and/or sealer before I'm through.

I redid my leg spacers again and 1 1/4" is a good number all around. No one inch pieces are needed except between topmost piece. It gets a little tight laying in the pipe insulation but 1.25" the magic number. My wife helped me put the pipe insulation on both sets of legs. Since the legs are all attached together, I made a jig to hold each set. That made applying the glue and pulling the pipe insulation around the wood an easy and clean task. We had no problems at all and wrapped them both in a short period of time. No glue all over the place like some stories I've read. After we were done, I wrapped each section in that 6" plastic wrap you can get at office supply stores. That will hold it in place while it dries.

I still need to assemble the waist pieces and attach them to the legs. That's for tomorrow. I had to finish the legs before I could hook them together.

Still pondering the stack

After work I sanded the daylights out of the tread section again. It looks much better now. Restacking the components and staring at it for about an hour gave me some good ideas. My wife brought a pad of paper out so I could write the ideas down after I got them. Plus bouncing some of them off her solidified my decisions. Now I have a plan to put the B9 together solid. I can use a bunch of the new hardware I bought yesterday.

I also played with the sound system some more and it works perfect. What a sweet system with many flexible ways to configure it. My robot will be talking this weekend and should start looking good. I got all weekend cleared to work on it.

First experiment with sound

I went to habitat for humanity outlet store today and bought some extra robot supplies for a great price. I got a ton of bolts, large screws, wire and a few miscellaneous robot parts for future projects. All in all it weighed about a hundred pounds. Tonight I just played with the new sound board and amplifier but couldn't get it to work.

Tomorrow I'll read the directions.

d

Legs

I assembled the legs tonight using 4 3" bolts going over a spacer for each leg. So each layer has 4 bolts attached to the layer above it. I hope it lines up well and the space is correct for the pipe insulation because it's a bit of work adding all those bolts to the layers. It's overkill but a solid design.

I still need to figure out how to attach all the sections together.

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Align legs, knees and waist

About 20 times I figured out how I was going to align the legs/ knees/ waist sections and about 20 times I found flaws in my plans. I want to make it flexible so I can take it apart easily into sections yet have the robot very sturdy. I also want to make it look very level. My wife and I worked on figuring out the optimum space between layers to accomodate the pipe insulation. Basically 1 1/4 " between layers that have two pieces of insulation (top and bottom) and 1" for layers that only have 1 piece pipe insulation butting up to wood. I priced nylon spacers at Lowes they were too expensive so I cut spacers out of pvc pipe I had laying around the garage. I tried cutting it with my scroll saw but the cuts weren't very level. My pvc cutting tool is also not very clean cutting. On a whim, I grabbed my pipe cutter and tried it. Worked like a charm and made very clean cuts. Plus no plastic dust from saws. Occasionally the pipe cutter would make a bad cut but all in all it wasn't too bad. I think the measurements were more accurate also.

I got a really cool sound board in the mail today. Got the idea from one of the members in the B9 club. He had it on his R2D2 site. The people involved in these clubs are extremely helpful and clever. This sound board takes input from a compact flash card and I can hook it up to my remote control. This option is so much more efficient than sticking a cd player and amp in the robot. This card does it all. I can get up to 11 hours of sound on a card the size of a postage stamp. Plus I can switch cards out anytime I want. It also has background sounds that can activate between triggering sounds. I would also like to add switches to the bezel buttons that trigger some of the sounds. Not sure how to put a switch on a bezel buttons yet. Then again, I don't have my bezel and buttons yet.

Weird primer

I figured out I had the wrong primer so I sanded down the treadbox. The silver lining is the paint showed the imperfections so I know I have to do a lot better job in the sanding department. I finally got the garage cleaned up so I'll save that job for later.

Treadbox primer

Today I finished the last pieces of the treadbox by putting in the outer spacers. The ones that keep the thin 1/4" outer plywood in place. I just glued those in and didn't use screws. I was hoping to start on the armaflex pipe tubing today but instead will focus on finishing the tread section and getting it to look nice. I keep wondering how I'm going to align, attach and space out the legs and waist sections. Dad came up with a good way to split the armaflex pipe insulation. We staple it to a board I mounted high up on the wall in the garage. Then run a razor blade from top to bottom and it produces a nice clean straight cut.

We had a lot of tropical weather today as hurricane Dennis passed by headed for Pensacola. A lot of wind and rain is all we got. I tried to spray a little primer on the tread box but it was so humid that spider webs spray came out so I'll do that later.

Burning the midnight oil

Today I worked off and on until midnight on putting the tread section together. It's much more work than I thought. But part of it was not doing everything in the right order so I would have to take everything apart sometimes to add screws to an otherwise inaccessible area. The mdf wasn't as strong as I thought and in the few cases where I didn't drill my pilot hole long enough, the mdf cracked when the drywall screw was put in. The cracks weren't too bad and I filled them with glue and clamped where able.

The top of the tread section just doesn't seem too secure. Especially since my bazillion dollar robot is going to be sitting on top. I couldn't help but be concerned with the way the top plate of the tread section attaches to the flimsy 1/2" mdf. Brad also mentioned this to me and told me I should brace it up better. So I laid in a piece of 1" wood just under the lower knee plate and attached it securely to the tread section. Now I have something solid to attach the upper parts of the robot to and I feel pretty good about taking the extra time to do this. Dad also was concerned about this area. Another thing I'm doing is replacing the two lower knee plates (on the tread box) with one double sized plate. That will add more strength and stability to the base of the robot. I know it's supposed to be two feet so I'll find some way to make it look like it's two pieces instead of one solid one.

Today we drilled a lot of holes and Dad brought over a bit that was a countersinking tool. Man did that work beautiful to countersink all of the screws. I never used one of those before and always used a larger drill bit in the past. I'll be buying one of those bits for myself. After I got the treadbox 90% together, I started with the wood filler to begin finishing.

Almost ready to stack

I stopped by Brads today after work to look at his work in progress robot and learned more tips to help when I stack the robot this weekend (depending on if the hurricane that's passing by doesn't make any unexpected turns). He's working on 4 different robots now and I don't know how he does it.

I decided to make some modifications to the tread section to reinforce the top plates. First, I'm going to make the top of the tread section one piece instead of two for strength. I'll trim the two pieces I already cut and add those under the solid piece to strengthen the whole assembly and give me something solid to screw into for the top pieces. After dinner, I created 2 more knees pretty quickly.

The more I work with wood, the easier and more rewarding it is. After the knees I pieced the tread section together with clamps to see how everything fits. Everything fit good but I'm going to make some 1 3/4" spacers in the morning with the table saw so it's nice and square when I put it together.

Two knees sort of a stack

I was able to thread dowel rod throughout the entire tread section tonight after using the dremmel to enlarge the 1/2" holes a bit. It looked good put together so I did a pre-stack balancing the knee leg and waist pieces on top.

I don't know how I did it but in my infinate wisdom, I just realized that I was 2 knees short. I can't believe that I misread the plans and shorted myself on knees. Making two more delays the much awaited first stack but oh well .... I'm having fun. I never was good at reading directions.

Cooling the garage off and Legs, knees and waist

The entire morning was spent installing a celing fan in the garage and crawling around in the crawl space of the garage wiring it. Plus I cleaned out a lot of stuff we forgot we had in the attic. Dad replaced the ceiling fans in their house when they moved in and saved the old ones. We installed it by the workbench area to keep it cooler while working. After all, this is Florida and it does get a tad warm in the summer but not too bad. Makes building robots a lot more pleasant.

In the afternoon we cut all the cutouts in the waist, legs and knees. Didn't do much more with the treadbox today and will probably assemble it next weekend. No hurry. Dad did most of the cutting with his sabre saw.

Cutting wood and trying to tame the rotozip

Dad came over and we got a lot done. That new table saw worked beautiful and I'm glad I got it. It saved a lot of time and was very smooth cutting. I cut out an extra knee laminate so I could experiment with the rotozip circle cutter on 1" wood. The rotozip sucked and butchered the wood. It just wasn't smooth enough. So Dad I and cut the remaining knees out with the scroll saw and jig saw. We took our time and after a little sanding, they looked perfect. Then the router put a nice 45degree angle on them. As I do more woodworking, everything gets better with practice. It's very satisfying.

Today we started looking at assembling the tread box and discovered I screwed up in cutting out the inner parts of some pieces. Several that shouldn't have been cut out were and several that needed cutout didn't get it. I can't believe I mixed up several of the pieces as careful as I've been on this project but it happened. The compromise I made is to cut out the pieces that need cutting and I'll leave the 2 inner 1/4" pieces cut out even though they shouln't be cutout. If I motorize the B9 (way down the road) then having the inner pieces cutout will be to my advantage. There ... I just justified it.

Almost all the wood is cut. I only need sand a lot of the pieces and cut the insides out. Also need to clean the edges of the legs and waist section. May use my router for that and drive my neighbors nuts for another day (It's pretty loud).

Laminating wood for knees

ok my table saw back and exchanged it for a better quality table saw. Other one was dangerous. I laminated several pieces of 1/2" mdf to re-make the knees using the correct width wood. I have another project that I can use for those old knees.