Old tools new tools

On the new tool front, on an impulse purchase walking through Lowes, some electric snips / scissors were acquired. Cutting large sheets of styrene with conventional scissors is a pain so I thought I'd give these a try. At $16.00 I had nothing to lose. And I'm glad I got them. They very work well trimming and cutting styrene. The angles are still a bit tricky.

On the old tool front, I pulled out a hand saw to cut a piece of wood this morning as I didn't want to make noise early in the morning and wake everyone. It got me thinking. Does anyone ever use hand saws any more? Are they antiques now? I haven't used a hand saw in many years now that I think of it. Why should I when I have all these efficient power saws at my disposal.

Progress is moving forward on the bus stop robots. Heads were cut out yesterday and just need to be assembled with a method of efficiently attaching them to the body / motors. That will be another major challenge.

Skins are being glued onto the robots. I only have so many clamps so I can only work on one robot at a time. Glue and skins will take time.

Motor mounts - again

I find myself getting an idea and then marrying myself to it. So then I spend hours and hours trying to make it work without looking at other options. Tonight out of the blue I came up with a completely different way to mount the head motors in a simple fashion that will allow removing or repairing the motors easily. Plus this technique also gives the under neck area a lot of strength. Mounting the head may be another problem but I'm not going to think about that quite yet. Still need to build the heads. Might be a good project for tomorrow.

Hopefully the weather will start cooling down in a month or so. It's been crazy hot down here the last couple years. Glad Dad and I installed a ceiling fan over my work bench. Also keeps the mosquitos away at night.

Robot Luggage

I don't know why I never noticed the suitcase in the bus stop robots picture. I guess my eyes were always drawn to the two robots sitting there with the bus stop sign. But between the robots sits a lone piece of luggage under the bench. Actually the scanned picture on my blog doesn't show the luggage but I bought the magazine and in that picture you can see it clearly.

Coincidentally the day a friend of ours remarked about the luggage in the picture was the same day Yvonne and I were sitting in Paul's room and talking. Talking about this goofy suitcase from the 40's or 50's that Paul owned. He always told us he thought it was valuable. I'll admit it sure had personality but I can't see it being collectible. It's one of those light colored suitcase (small size) with a big brown strip down the middle. Paul's had this since he was a little kid and bought it at a garage sale for some reason that I can't remember.

So ..... this suitcase will be finally put to good use and accompany the bus stop robots on our front porch when the project is finished.

A few wrinkles in the plans

The skin was cut and ready to attach. As I couldn't remember what I used to attach styrene to the B9 treadsection, I went to a website that I had bookmarked which had a form you fill out to tell you the best adhesive to use for the materials.

I plugged in plastic and wood and was told to use goop. Well, that turned out to be bad advice because the goop melted the styrene in a few places ... particularly where a screw was in the wood under the styrene. One spot looked very wrinkley and a couple others the plastic was soft and like melted glue. This was 8 hours later.

So I ripped the skin off and we went to the park to read instead. No big deal. I have more styrene and plenty of sandpaper to resmooth the torso. No hurry here.

On another note ... speaking of wrinkles in our plans .... our lives have completely changed. Every fiber of our existence has been affected by the passing of our son Paul last month. I also feel my values are different and life's direction may be slowly turning. The first thing I'll be doing is selling the creature and the great white shark. And then ????? who knows. A couple of the robots look nervous.

Preparing to skin a robot

Today I added extra body spars in the armpit areas of the robots to give the styrene reinforcement in those areas. I'm taking my time and doing a good job so it's taking a little while. Countersinking all the screws, drilling holes for the screws so there's no cracked wood and just enjoying the build. Taking your time means there's more time to ponder the best way to put it together in a nice modular project that can be transported easily or taken apart if need be.

Earlier in the week, I mounted feet (new toilet plungers) and legs to the torsos and then attached them to a bench I built. So there were a couple of headless robots sitting on a bench in the garage ... goulish almost.

Hopefully I'll find some time tomorrow to do a little more work to the torsos and then attach robot skin (styrene). And after that gets a little silver paint things will start getting interesting.

Behind the scenes details

I haven't written much because I've been going back and forth on ideas a lot and was too lazy to write them all down here.

So much thought has gone into the little details that I never consider when I start these projects. Simple things like attaching the body to the pelvis and creating a method to freely sit so it doesn't roll over. And a biggie was a method of making the legs so they come off for transport. Also the hips/legs can't stick out too far or it will look out of proportion. I spent a lot of time creating a method to keep the legs as close to the center of the robot as possible so the arms are further out than the legs.

It's all these little behind the scene details that can take so much time and be a challenge. But as I'm not in a hurry, when the creativity dries up, I wait a day or so and something usually pops into my head. Now that I got a lot of the details finished, maybe I can make some heads. Then they will start looking like robots and not just wood and pvc.

Progress

Depression is hitting us like a ton of bricks but in waves which are slowly starting to come less frequently thanks to some great people we met. You can't fight it and just have to take it slow and easy ...

Yesterday was one month since Paul left us. And it's been the toughest month of our lives to say the least.

So today I decided to get some things accomplished for a change. I finally finished importing the older blog entries and the pictures. That was a job that I'm glad is over. Quite a bit was also accomplished with the bus stop robots.

It never fails. When I initially look at a project it always appears super easy. But usually after diving in, you find out there are a million little problems that need to be solved. And you can't rush the solutions. Often I figure it out while wandering the aisles of Home Depot, Lowes or Ace hardware.

The one problem that's still dogging me is how to make the motors accessible inside the robots. I'll probably have removable shoulder tops but still not 100% on that yet.

Hopefully the momentum will keep flowing so these robots get completed in a reasonable amount of time.

R5-PQ

A friend of ours (and Paul's) who also builds robots decided to dedicate one of his Droids to Paul. Brad met Paul early this year at MegaCon and hung out with him some. Anyways, Brad is making an R5 droid (1st star wars movie when Jawas were pawning off an R5 with a bad motivator to Luke and his uncle). Well Brad decided to give his R5 droid the designation R5-PQ (kind of rhymes with R2-D2). Paul would be honored and of course with Paul's sense of humor he would have a great joke to go along with a droid being named after him. Brad is creating the R5-PQ with Paul's preferred colors.

Should be a cool memorial to Paul.

Spinning my wheels

I haven't published pictures of the Bus Stop robots yet because I'm not getting much accomplished lately. I started out fine and made a decent amount of progress but I keep finding myself in a daze and not able to concentrate so I wander off to do something else. But slowly I'm getting through this with the help of some great people that I met who have been through the same thing we have.

So .... maybe next week we'll have some pictures and a little less depressing blog. Sorry but that's the way it is around here.