For the love of robots

We're heading out first thing tomorrow morning to drive two days in the truck to pick up a 1:1 life size Robby robot. Another interesting robot road trip with the wife. Talk about being a lucky guy ! Pictures next year.

Top and skin

Slow progress is better than no progress. As you can see in the picture, the dome and the skin are now in place and I started cutting and pasting the edges of the arm access hole.

The dome came out great. Better than I imagined. I used construction adhesive to attach the skin to the tube and then wrapped it with plastic wrap to firmly hold the skin in place while the adhesive dried. I use the plastic wrap on a roll that you buy in packaging places. As you wrap things, it tightens up. I used this stuff when I glued my B9 legs and it worked like a charm.

As you can see in the picture there's a spot on the top of the picture where the body dips a little. Unfortunately that's where a shoulder support bar is mounted. I don't think there is much I can do about that and not sure how much will show once I mount the nose and rivets. None of my projects are perfect so I'm not going to sweat a small detail like that yet.

Bob May in WPB

We had a chance to meet Bob May (the man in the Lost in Space Robot) at the West Palm Beach Science museum this weekend. They had a new robotic exhibit and had Bob May was there to kick it off. He's a super guy and told me to tell the members of the B9 builders club he appreciates all our support and enthusiasm toward the robot.

Another chance encounter at the museum happened with the guy (and his wife) who first told me about building B9 robots a couple years ago. Doug Vater and his wife Wanda were at the exhibit with their R2. I remember meeting Doug and somehow it came up that he built a Lost in Space Robot. That totally blew me away and for a couple months I couldn't stop thinking that people were actually building these robots. And that's what inspired me to consider building my own. Thanks Doug and Wanda !

Here's a few pictures of the event this weekend.

Incredible shrinking jawa

It's that time of the year when robot building slows down while other priorities are taken care of. So I haven't had much time to get out in the garage to do anything productive robot wise. However the last couple of days I managed to get a couple hours in to shrink the Jawa down about 4 inches. He was too tall. I probably could have taken another couple inches but it's fine now.

So don't look for too many more entries unti the middle of January. There's just too many other things going on around here. January should be a busy robot tinkering month though.

Busy time of the year

Between helping my son with their bait shop, projects around the house, planning the MegaCon Robot invasion and holiday projects, robot building has been put at the bottom of the list until the beginning of January.

I like being busy so a few weeks away from robot building won't matter much.

Members of the B9 club stop by

Today was a great day because Charlie G. and his wife from the B9 robot builders club stopped by. It was Charlie's birthday and his wife treated him to a weekend at Disney world with time to stop by here for a visit.

Well a couple hours seemed like only a couple minutes and before we knew it they were on their way home. It was nice discussing robots and building ideas. Charlie's Batcave is a very cool project that he has been working on.

After they left, I was inspired to finished the dome for my Gort robot and it actually came out better than I thought.I still need to hot glue it to a foam base I made and then hotglue that to the sonotube.

Trimming the dome

I MUST !!!! buy some ear protection. Cutting the flying saucer dome was maddeningly loud once again. I'll probably be spending the next couple days saying "what" a lot.

Cutting the saucer, I used a combination of tin snips, rotozip, band saw, and last but not least a jig saw. Cutting the metal was tricky and I wore gloves to keep from shredding my hands. The metal was very sharp and snagged me more than once.

I cut about an extra inch around the oval diameter I will need. The next step will be to cut it on the line. I'm taking my time on this step. I had a 2" heavy foam piece that I cut out as the template of the top of the robot and used the foam piece to mark the inside of the metal flying saucer. The foam piece will be mounted in the top of the robot and the dome will fit on top of that. Just not sure what adhesive or method I'll have to use to attach the dome, foam and sonotube together.

Another major robot milestone today was we (I got permission from my wife) officially bought a life size Robby the Robot. I got a pretty good deal on him and just need to figure out how to get him to Florida. Looks like a long road trip will be in order soon.