Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Building Up To Maker Faire: Shawn Thorsson’s ED-209- Part 1”.
Hi, my name is sean thorson. I make props and costumes for all sorts of different applications and this year to get ready for the maker faire, i’m building a giant bad guy robot from the original robocop movies called ed209. It’S going to be everything i can do to get it done just in time for the event, and here we go. Basically, this is one of those things when i was a little kid, i saw it for the first time and was just absolutely blown away.
The movie had a lot of stuff going on, but at the end of it you know watched it many times on rented vhs tape and, like this creature was the only thing that i really came away with by the time it was done. It’S big it’s scary. It’S ugly, it’s mean and uh.
You know it’s kind of got a lot of glitches that give it a lot of personality makes it really. You know lovable um the actual build process. When i’ve done all of my research, it really amounted to a couple of people. Working out of uh, you know not much bigger than mine workshop in san rafael and the whole thing was done in basically the same way that i’m going to be doing it basically talking about the scale factor. The challenge is, i’m working off of mostly an action figure and a whole lot of behind the scenes photographs that i’ve collected over the years and uh. The big challenge is all the old photographs that i’ve found there’s a lot of things that you can use for kind of scale references, but nothing really hard and fast, like there’s, never been a photograph that i’ve been able to find where somebody just happened to lean A yardstick against this thing where it was built, you know, against the wall, so i’ve been pouring over all these photos, trying to find anything that i can use to give me a verifiable measurement that i can translate into real life, and so far i just haven’t Had any luck, so the next best thing i can do is there’s all these photos looking at people standing next to the thing, so what i ended up doing was i actually printed out a couple of full length photographs of myself scaled to different heights, finally decided On a scale factor of 10.6, so every measurement i take off of this – i multiply by that – and that gives me my measurements for actually cutting parts and building prototypes so quick update for what we’ve got going so far.
I started with the lower portion of the leg for ed, it’s big, but the whole thing’s big. It’S going to get really crowded in here over the course of the next couple of weeks as more of the prototypes start coming together. This whole thing’s made mostly out of just cheap particle board and mdf and random scraps that i’ve had sitting around the workshop. It doesn’t really matter at this stage, since the whole thing is going to be molded in fiberglass and then i’m going to pull copies in fiberglass. So really, if i could figure out a way to make it out of navel lint and bubble gum, it really wouldn’t matter, because this thing in the end is probably going to be destroyed. The finished pieces are going to be much more durable, much more long, lasting much stronger, lighter, cheaper, all that so the first portion here.
It looks huge, of course, because i’ve got it sitting on top of a pair of buckets, but in the end it’s actually going to sit a little lower and be canted quite a ways back and of course, this is just the first section of the leg. The next piece which i’m also started on is going to be the thigh here which will attach right there and then, of course, there’s also the big rails that’ll stick up out of the back where his heel goes once that’s done. The next step is going to be working on the forearms, the actual gun pods, and for that i’ve sourced a plywood cylinder which is going to get cut to about this long and then have all the extra parts added onto it. In order to make it look. Like the beast from the film, so that’s what we got so far all right! This is my vacuum: forming machine. If you’re not familiar with the process of vacuum, forming it’s basically taking a sheet of plastic heating it up until it’s soft and pliable, then you stretch it over a form, use a vacuum source to suck the air out from under the form.
The sheet conforms to the shape, and once it cools off, it remains in the same shape. It’S used for making a lot of things. You’Ve probably seen stormtrooper armor star wars done this way just about everybody runs into one of these any given day made same process. Thinner, plastic, all right.
So in order to use this particular machine which is currently in table mode, the fact forming table, i remove all the stuff from the top. You can see the surface. There has a series of holes drilled in it. This is what you call forming platen and, what’s going to end up happening, is i’ll, take whatever shapes, i want set them on top of the forming plate, and then i’ve got a sheet of plastic which i’ll clamp into this frame.
The frame gets clamped together with the sheet inside then the frame gets hooked in up here. Where my heating oven is. If you take a look up in there, you can actually see just the nichrome wire heating elements plug it into a 220 source. It gets very warm very quickly and then once the sheet sags enough to where i’m sure it’ll be able to stretch over the forms on the table, pull the sheet down, push it down over the forms and then engage the vacuum. Then it sucks out the last little bit of air. It’S a tremendously high pressure and you end up getting all the really fine details on the forms.
Another one of the main workhorses in my shop as far as machinery goes. Is my craftsman carve right, cnc machine. So basically, you put in a plank it feeds through, as the plank is feeding through there’s a cutting head that moves back and forth and up and down at the same time, and by the time it’s all said and done, you’ve got a three-dimensional piece that comes Out most recently, i carved out this piece. These are all the segments that are going to become the left thigh for pseudo iron man, armor that i made recently. I decided i need to make them a little bit thicker in the thighs. So this is the redo over in this corner, once i’ve got molds actually made. The next thing is all of the casting actually gets done, so you take the molds mix up a batch of whatever type of resin or plastic or rubber. I’M going to end up using when it’s all said and done and pour them into the molds and come out with the different pieces that you need. There’S also little rifle molds little pistol, molds little fuel tank molds, all kinds of things that i’m currently building. So at this point i’ve got most of a leg put together when you tune in next time, i’ll be started on the arms and i’ll.
Have the toes done i’ll also be getting started, making some fiberglass molds. So we can talk about exactly how these pieces are going to be turned from really horrible examples of carpentry into some really impressive pieces of fiberglass .