Project Orbots Phase 3
Phase 3 of Project Orbots is the assembly phase. What I do is cast a bunch of parts, then file off the flash and any excess resin there may be. Then I put the pieces together so that they look like figures and not piles of parts. This is simultaneously the most fun and the most frustrating part of the whole process. It's nice to finally see the project coming together, but getting to the point where figures are assembled is oftentimes laborious and repetitive. It depends on how many parts I cast. For Mighty Orbots I made enough pieces to construct ten figures. I'm trying to decide how many I'll paint as Mighty Orbots, because I could always paint a couple of them like Tobor, the dark evil twin of Mighty Orbots from the episode 'Devil's Asteroid'.
The picture to the left shows the parts as they come straight out of the molds. There's lots of extra resin that has to be sanded off and I do that with my Dremel. I have a cordless rechargeable and all that sanding really puts a beating on the batteries. So there are times when everything's going good and work is getting done and then the Dremel dies and I have to wait a couple hours before I can continue. The picture to the right shows how I mark each part in pencil. These marks serve as guides that tell me where I need to drill holes to insert the connecting pegs that will keep the parts connected to each other.
The connecting pegs are leftover resin rods I have from previous resin casting projects. Sometimes I'll have to make vents in my molds so that air can escape during the casting process, and what happens is resin ends up in these vent channels and it makes little resin rods. I keep them because they make good connecting pegs. It's not a very high tech method of connecting parts, and the parts don't stay connected if you pull them out, but the idea is that everything's going to be glued together anyway and the pegs only really function as anchors. The picture on the right shows the upper torso parts connected to each other with pegs.
Each figure is made up of 10 seperate parts. At this point I'm thinking I might not glue the arms in place so that they can rotate at the shoulders. At first this was strictly going to be a statue and I didn't intend to have any rotation at the shoulders at all. I'm also thinking about drilling an extra hole in the back of the head so I can take it off and put it back on, making it look like Mighty Orbots' head is looking up. This is cool because then I can do the pose from the opening animation where it's flying across the derelict spaceship like Superman.
So I've gotten this far and there are some things that are annoying me regarding the overall proportions of the figure. It looks to me like the legs might be too small or the arms are too long, I can't quite figure it out. Part of the problem is due to how the artists constantly exaggerated the robot's proportions in the cartoon. My mind keeps telling me the Bort and Crunch portions of the legs should take up half the overall height of the figure.
In the end I'm still happy with how it's coming out. At this point it would be difficult to alter the size of the legs without a major overhaul of the whole lower torso sculpt, and I'm not about to do that. That's the double edged sword of situations like this where even the slightest of changes can make a huge difference in the final appearance. I could make the legs bigger but then other proportion problems may arise from doing that. It's such a small tinge of self doubt that I'll trust my initial drawings and original vision and have faith that it's going to work out in the end. Sometimes seeing the figure in the all white resin can disguise what the final product will look like.