Recent Project – Pose-able Robot Action Figure!

When I was going to college in the 70s, I started sketching a simple cartoon robot figure in the margins of my class notebooks when I got bored in class. I sketched this little fellow for years, and then eventually forgot about him. I stumbled across a few of those sketches a couple months ago and thought, “How hard could it be to create a model of him and print it out as a 1/6 scale pose-able action figure?”

The answer is, it could be pretty hard. Lots of prototype joints to get the tolerances right. Trying different materials to find something hard enough to stand up to repeated posing without wearing out. Prototype #1 came apart after a few poses. But after some joint redesign and experimentation with PETG, Prototype #2 is holding up pretty well.

I haven’t bothered with doing any surface finishing or detailed painting on the prototype. I was just printing medium quality to verify functionality and proportions. Hit it with some aging silver spray paint I had laying around to get it’s features to stand out, and here’s the result. His working name is Vector.