Robots and the Easter Bunny

So what does the Easter Bunny and the bus stop robots have in common? Easter eggs of course ... just look at the new robot elbows and hands.

In another burst of creative inspiration, I got some of those plastic easter eggs and cut them on the band saw to fit over the joints of the bus stop robot arms. They also will make good wrists or the basis of hands if I can find some good fingers. These bots are getting finished or else !

And yesterday I got that epoxy resin that Mike mentioned and I painted a coat on after thickening it up with the microballoons. That stuff seems to work excellent. I'm not sure how many coats I'll need or how it's going to sand but I think it's a winner. Much better than that plaster stuff I was putting over the styrofoam.

I got a couple more R2 parts and am really starting to get pumped about hitting the R2 project hard around mid March when my frame gets shipped. Once I have that, then R2D2 will be up and running around our house in no time. C3PO will be very glad.

Bus Stop robot arms

At the pace I've been going lately, today is a banner day for Bus Stop robot building. I was able to attach the arms decently where I can unbolt them easily if I need to work on the robot or for transport. Over the past couple months, I've considered all sorts of ways to attach the arms but kept running into dead ends because of the way I designed that area.

But FINALLY on Saturday I was blessed with bad weather and storms so I opted to stay in the garage instead of going out on the Sailboat/Kayak. And that's when the brainstorm hit ! I also came up with an idea to make the robot a little more realistic by beefing up the upper arms by sliding an extra piece of pvc over the arm up to the elbow joint. Looks less like pvc and more like an arm. And down by the feet, I added a few extra pieces of wide pvc to give the "Shoes" a little different look (to look less like a plunger).

There's still a lot of things to work out (hands for one) and I'm still hoping the heads turn out ok. But it's some progress. I need to get these complete to make way for R2 very soon.

Also this weekend my friend and I finished joining her 4 poplar pieces of wood and cut out a custom desk top. I have to say using the biscuit joiner went very smooth. After sanding it down, it looked beautiful. She was very proud of the work we did and we both learned a lot. The project was a success. It's nice making stuff.

Why it pays to blog

Working with foam is completely new to me. I started working with it kind of blindly figuring that I would learn as I go. And so far, I found it has been a good way to fabricate/sculpt objects inexpensively. The challenge so far has been to lay on a hard sandable coating over the foam.

My last blog entry mentioned that I melted the foam using some simple marine gelcoat I purchased at the local marine store. I thought I had sealed the foam good enough but it still was able to affect the underlying foam and melt it.

So this morning I found in my comments section some excellent tips from Mike about using epoxy resin and microballoons to thicken it. Mike btw has previously offered other helpful hints in the comment section. So armed with this latest tip and google, I opened up a whole bunch of doors to sculpting with styrofoam and coatings. I found a pretty good small company that you can ask questions (http://www.jgreer.com/) and then ordered some epoxy and microballoons (which they call something else). I sometimes prefer dealing with smaller companies.

So next week I'll re-address coating the bus stop robot heads with resin.

Thanks Mike !

Head melting

Covering the styfofoam heads with the hardner and then filling in the cracks is very time consuming. The hardner is like plaster (maybe that's all it is). So glooping it on the heads and then sanding it off ultimately makes thin spots over the foam.

So last night I was looking at the bus stop robot heads and considered the many hours needed to get them into a state where they could be painted and look good. And then I impulsively I went out and purchased a can of gelcoat to experiment. I wanted to see what gelcoat would do over the plaster and if it would fill in a lot of the imperfections. I reasoned I could paint a little gelcoat on the backside of one of the heads.

Well, by acting on my impulse and not thinking this through, I ended up with a couple ugly holes that were melted in the back of the head where the plaster was thin or a crack where the gelcoat could leak through to melt the styrofoam. Kind of a mess but the head is still usable. What I should have done is painted the heads with a latex paint first. I think that may have sealed it better so the gelcoat wouldn't react to the styrofoam. Ahhhhh yes another lesson in building.

New shoes by the front door

We usually have several pair of shoes lined up by the front door so I decided to add another pair to the mix using a spare pair of feet that I had from a C3PO protocol droid. Looks normal for around here ....

In other breaking robot building news I went to the habitat resale store and bought some brackets that may work nicely in assisting to support the bus stop robot heads.

Biscuit joiner

Ok, I have to admit I get a little carried away buying tools occasionally. Last year I saw a biscuit joiner on sale and it was such a good deal I couldn't pass it up. And then it sat in my garage ..... for a long time ... in it's nice new box.

But last night I finally had a good reason to pull it out of that box and learn how to use it. A friend of mine wanted to build a new wood top for her desk and I was delighted to offer my new shiny biscuit joiner to join the wood together. So she came over last night and had dinner with us and we proceeded to experiment with the joiner. We used some scrap wood together in our experiments before cutting into her expensive wood.

And many lessons were learned. The most notable came when my wife came out to see how we were doing and my woodworking student blurted out "pretty good except for Jim messed up the default settings on the tool ha ha. So I had to carefully explain to her when working in the garage guys always cover for each other and try to gloss over or forget about the stupid mistakes we often make. Especially when it involves not reading the directions first. "But I'm not a guy" she lamely retorted.

Working with this biscuit joiner reminded me of my high school woodshop class many years ago. Back then we used dowel rod to join two pieces of wood together. I think I prefer the dowel rod in that it seems stronger. But the biscuit joiner is a lot easier to get the holes lined up.

Don't you just love the smell of sawdust in the garage and peeling glue off your fingers !

Foam heads at last

As our older son came home to visit for the weekend from the Virgin Islands I was limited to garage time but I did get a chance to experiment on working with foam and the exterior foam hardner. I have to say it looks like this is going to be a great medium to fabricate parts for robots.

It's not as easy as I thought but foam is forgiving and sand able. So I made a few extra heads until I finally perfected my technique (and ran out of Styrofoam). The goop that covers the styrofoam mixes up easily with water and makes a goop that you slop on over the foam. It's pretty hard when it dries and can be sanded. But like Bondo, it is a challenge to get smooth.

I also resurrected my home made foam cutter by buying a decent power supply. After getting the power supply in the mail today, I hooked it up and immediately had a super heavy duty large foam cutter at my disposal. And it worked well with the guitar strings. That foam cutter will allow me to carve very large blocks of foam as opposed to the little measley cutters I bought at the hobby shop. This is just perfect for cutting out a Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons body. Another noteworthy fact with foam is you can make large blocks by hot gluing the foam together. Works perfect !

The weight of these new heads is just a fraction of what my wooden heads weighed in at. So now I'm back to the challenge of mounting the heads to the motors on the robots .... but at least I don't have to fight all that weight.

Hot Foam cutter

Well after several miserable attempts to make a foam cutter I finally broke down and spent a few dollars and bought one.

The old train transformer I bought on EBAY turned out to be bad and it was too many months since I bought it to ask for a refund. So I tried different power sources and different types of guitar strings but was never happy with the results. So last night I decided to just buy some foam cutting tools.

A cool thing I discovered in the hobby store was a foam hardener that I can use after carving the foam. I may do this instead of using fiberglass as it looks like it makes it hard as a rock. This will be super for building my Rosie the Robot body and especially when making new heads for the Bus Stop Robots. I need to get those robots completed. I'm kicking around using earth magnets to hold the legs and arms on the robots so they can be removable for transport.

Drifting

I just can't seem to get back on track or into a building groove. It just isn't working any more. I go into the garage and anything that doesn't work right just sets me back and I'm almost paralyzed by a deep depression. You would think six months after losing our son would be enough time to get it together but it seems to just get worse by the day. It really sucks. And I'm sick of it. I used to be good at fixing things but I can't fix this.