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Saturday, March 18, 2006

Bender's arms




Today was primarily spent on Bender's arms. To make them poseable, I used a heavy guage multi strand piece of wire as the base. One piece of wire attached to the torso and extending into the right and left arms. On top of the wire were multiple pieces of 3/4" pvc 1 1/4" long. Over the PVC was a piece of 1 1/8" foam PVC Pipe insulation. On top of the foam pipe insulation were pieces of 2" pvc cut 2" long.

The result was solid poseable arms. I tried about a dozen different approaches before coming up with this combination. I'm still not sure about the outer 2" pieces of pvc. It doesn't look the way I envisioned so I'll keep thinking about it until I come up with a better look.

Being a flexible builder ... VERY flexible is one of the most important aspects of building these things. There's usually many ways to accomplish your tasks. Some people get stuck in a messy part of their projects and get frustrated. It kills their enthusiasm and the project eventually dies a slow death. That may be why you see people selling their partially completed robots. You got to be flexible in accepting your screwups or mistakes.

When I get to that point, I allow myself to deliberately cut corners and compromise ... TEMPORARILY. Go on with something else with the attitude that you will go back and eventually fix or redo the part you were having trouble with. Everyone ... even the genius builders out there ... have setbacks and problems. That's actually part of the fun.

And so that's why I'm leaving the lame looking 2" pieces of PVC on the outer arms for now. It looks just so so.

I also worked on the creature a little. It looks like he was abused because of the tears in his skin. In many areas the latex outer skin was separated from itself. I got my wife to thread a needle for me so I could experiment with sewing him up. It worked ok but it's slow going and I need to get heavier thread. After that's finished I'll brush on some liquid latex and then apply some paint on the finish. Creature needs a lot of work and is an interesting project.

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