Not a Robot

So clearly this is not a robot. But it is very cool. It came together pretty quickly in the midst of working on another robot. I love the way it looks and it is in keeping with the machine age asthetic I try to capture. Right now I am working on a series the shows the creative process, look for it soon.

Humorous Diversions

My memory was jogged last night regarding a great commercial that aired on Saturday Night Live back in the 90's. It was for Old Glory Robot Attack Insurance. I think its hysterical and love the robot they came up with for the piece. Enjoy.

Smaller Creations

The size robots I build seems to fall into a few groups. Large (bigger than 2 feet) Medium (1-2 feet) and small, like these:

These range from about one and a half to a little over six inches. The smaller scale is fun to work with but seems to have little impact on how much time is involved. The quickest one has come together is about 30 minutes, some have taken over a year of pondering and tinkering, most take a couple of weeks of on-and-off work. Either way its rewarding and the end product always makes me smile. 

Cool things I find

So I'm sitting at the bench pulling apart an old voltmeter and find this:

Naturally the next inclination is to search for Burgess Batteries on the interweb and I come up with this:

Clearly the good people at Burgess Battery (bought by Mallory Batteries, now known as Duracell) had the same vision of robots that I do. The cool thing is this battery is still kicking out 1.2 volts! God knows how long it's been in there. The other cool thing is that pulling apart stuff invariably gives me lots of other parts, now I need to think of what to do with an ancient, but still usable dry cell.

Hot off the Robotorium Bench

I just finished this last week. This is one of those that sort of fell together in an unintentional sort of way. Some I set out to create, usually with a body, or head, but it usually starts with a part that will be the body. This one came about just by  fiddling with parts, then one thing led to another and this is the result. Its about 6" tall, and heavy - the body is made of 2 steel bearing cups held together with neodymium magnets. The head rotates freely and the arms rotate about the shoulder. Kind of reminds me of Gort.