As often is the case, I have many fuzzy plans in my head how to do something. And once the work begins, none of the plans pan out. So I do a lot of wandering around my garage poking in boxes and looking on shelves for inspiration. Or I'll wander the aisles of Home Depot or Lowes.
For Bender's hands, I considered using my jig saw and make some elaborate wood hands with holes where fingers would protrude. But practically, heavy wood on the ends of arms would weight them down and make arm positioning/posing difficult. So a lightweight set of hands and poseable fingers were what was needed.
The Vacuum cleaner hose I bought the other day had 2 connectors that fit over the arms perfectly. A piece of scrap foam rubber over that fastened with a little duct tape allowed me to position an old duct tape cardboard inner circle over the connectors. And the hand actually looked pretty good.
The problem was I only had one roll of duct tape that was about done. Low and behold, in my junk robot parts box (that has everything you can imagine in it), I found that in my ignorant wisdom, I saved an empty cardboard backing from my last roll of duct tape. That even surprised me.
The fingers were made of some multistrand wire intertwined together. Then some pieces of my scrap foam pipe insulation were slit to form 3 fingers. Some more duct tape over the fingers and then I cut up some old black gloves I also had in my robot parts box. These gloves were leftover from a Target Sale. My wife bought them when I was building my Jawa. These happened to be too big but the price was almost nothing so I kept them.
Of course the hands get some finish and paint but he's definately starting to look like a Bender bot.
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