Pit Bot- The Making Of : Part 1

Finally, after nearly 4 years I have decided to do a detailed article about the process behind making my 3rd year modelmaking Final Project. I am going to break it up into sections for ease of publishing etc, hope you all enjoy it!!

Initial Design

The concept for the Pit Bot goes back to 2nd year college in 08', fellow classmate Craig Kane had the idea for a futuristic hovering race vehicle and the world it inhabited. So Craig, Kyle Castles and myself decided to tie our 3 Final projects together with the story of a Sci-Fi racing team. The pieces that we would produce would in theory be used in a live action movie. Craig was going to design a miniature of the racing vehicle, Kyle would produce a life size pilot costume  and as I've always been fascinated with robots decided to design and build a full-size prop and lighting reference of the Pit Bot- which is one of many droids working in the pitstop of the hover races.

My initial designs had full legs, but soon realised with only 4 months to build the life-size version, legs would not be completed. So i turned to the idea that the robot could be a floating torso, with a hover pad instead of legs.

after finding a design that i was happy with I realised that it would be best to model the character in digital 3D and then use that model as a blueprint for all measurements. So i popped my 3D model into AutoCad and printed full size layouts which were pinned up around my workstation

Construction Begins

The next step was to make plaster blocks, which would then be carved into shapes using the print-outs from the 3D model as templates.

Then it was just a case of using the large BandSaw in the workshop to cut out the basic profile, and using chisels and rasps to add the curves etc..

 

First part to mould was the head (looking back i would have done the mould differently, but i suppose thats why the call it learning!). I wanted to have an open ended mould because it was only going to be a shell i needed to cast.

a quick silicone mould and fiberglass jacket later...

 then I took a cast in fiberglass..

next was the torso, i ended up scrapping the plaster one i carved and used a CNC milling machine to mill out a layered MDF version which was filled and sanded- the reason for this was that i needed it to be perfectly symmetrical

 then another silicone and fiberglass jacket mould..

which I could then pull two fiberglass casts out and pop them back to back to make the base torso.

Think I'll leave it here for Part 1,

stay tuned for Part 2!!