Building robots takes a lot of smarts and a lot of money. But just because you don’t have a scholarship from MIT and development funding doesn’t mean you can’t make a robot. It just means you have to change the materials a little bit.
Instructions
Make a Robot Out of Pipe Cleaners
1. Go to the arts and crafts store and pick up some supplies. Obviously, you’ll need pipe cleaners. Try to get them fairly thick so the robot will more easily stand up on it’s own. You’ll also need material for the body parts. Pick up a pack of construction paper and some markers if you don’t already have it lying around the house.
2. Use two full pieces of pipe cleaner for the legs and cut three shorter and identical pieces for the arms and the spine. The arms and spine should be a little over half the size of the legs.
3. Cut a pipe cleaner in half for the shoulders and cut another piece a few centimeters shorter than the shoulders for the waist. This seems like a complex skeleton for a simple design. But really, by adding the shoulders, waist and spine you’ll be able to support the head and torso more easily.
4. Connect the pipe cleaners together to form the robot’s skeleton. The legs connect to the ends of the waist, the spine connects to the middle of the waist, the spine also connects to the middle of the shoulders with a few centimeters going past for the neck and the arms connect to the ends of the shoulders.
5. Outline and cut out boxes for the head, torso, feet and possibly hands (if you want). Each of the boxes is proportionate to their human counterparts, although it does help stability to make the feet fairly wide at the bottom. The torso box will have to have holes punched through it for the legs, arms and neck. Slide the torso on before assembling anything else.
6. Add details with markers. Eyes, mouth, buttons, control panel and whatever else you can think of can be added. You can also use more pipe cleaners for antennas. There are a few designs posted in the resources setion below if you’d rather follow a template.
Tags: waist spine, arms spine, connect ends, connects middle, head torso