Bakelite Robot - motion test
This week I turned my attention to my Bakelite Robot project. I mentioned its beginning stages in a previous post. Originally I felt that the ancient plastic material was too brittle to allow for the mounting of motors so I decided that the piece would not have any moving parts. A number of friends have been through my studio since then and they all ask the same question “What will this one do?”. It seems that I have set the expectation that all my sculptures in this vein contain some sort of mechanical component. In truth I too was a bit disappointed that it was not going to perform in some way. So, I scrapped the adjustable shoulder joints that I had spent nearly a full day building and set about mounting a pair of windshield wiper motors in their place. Windshield wiper motors are great because they are self-reversing and thus require no mechanism to be built on my part. A third one was mounted in the head too. The initial result is in the video below.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
As you can see the internal lighting is coming along nicely as well. I’m pleased with the warmth of all the light emanating from the thing. One of the nicer details is the eyes which unfortunately I have been unable to get decent images of. The tail end of the video attempts to show that the tiny VU meters in the eye sockets “pulse” and have the effect of batting eyelashes. This leads me to my chief concern with this piece: too damn cute. He is still waiting for hands and hopefully some additional facial features which could bring some more balance to his demeanor.
The detail in his belly is the inflow vent from an old heat gun. There is an LED fixture mounted behind red plastic inside it. The user can adjust the vents to allow more or less light to pass through.
