Making Robots No.1 They told me to wait

This is what I saw as I was walking to the golf shop in Adelaide carrying my camera and looking for interesting things. Well I could see an Ashley Wood robot there for the making and that is what possessed me to move away from sculpting figures, to enter the realm of assembling stuff. I hoped it would be more straight forward, would allow the greater use of cast objects and perhaps be able to make use of the plethora of plastic kits that have accumulated over the years. Kitbashing here I come!

You can see it can't you? That old tank is crying out for a new life as an equally old, sad neglected robot that everyone forgot.

And here it is. The title in my album is, "They told me to wait" and  that about sums up this poor bot's fate because it's destined to sit on that pier until it or the pier rots. When this was made very few photos were taken of the build, I think we were in the middle of a monsoon and I don't like to take my camera out of its dry box in that type of weather. Subsequent robots get a better deal than this sad chappie.

To get to the stage of assembling the piece I had to make or find the shapes that would do the job. The top pic is a panel of things I found in my workshop which were cast in resin and stored in convenient trays . This is one of many such groups of objects of basically the same size that could be cast and stored. Simple shapes such as cylinders and spheres of various sizes are essential in the types of figures I would be making and selective casting in partial moulds gives greater variety still.

 

 

As I said before,this build was not well documented but a few pics were taken. The top one is a smoothing and rounding of a cast sphere using a drill and the other is a way of using all those older moulds of zombies I had lying around. It takes quite a bit of work cutting up the silicon moulds before they can be fed into an old fashioned meat mincer, but once reduced to a small grain size, the silicon can be mixed with fresh stuff to bulk out future moulds. A thin layer of new silicon is poured into the mould box all over the master, thoroughly coating it and then a second thicker coat, augmented with the old cut up moulds, is added to the first coat thus giving the necessary thickness without having to use completely new silicon all the time. It saves a bit of a quite expensive product and works very well.

 

Final pictures of the robot undercoated sitting on the scratch built pier then a series of finished shots from various angles. The last is of a blue starfish living in the water under the pier and of the oysters that have grown on the rusting pier supports.