Saturday, October 30, 2010

Introducing Carl

Carl is based on a WowWee Alive robotic chimp head.  I won't go much into the history of the head itself since there's a lot of info on the Internet.

WoWee Alive Robotic Chimp
My wife got Carl's head for me at a garage sale.  She says the minute she saw it she knew I'd love it and boy was she right.  I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.  You see, by itself, it is literally just a head sitting on the upper half of the shoulders.  It was obvious to me that the head needed a body!

I proceeded to do some rudimentary carpentry and build a simple "doll" body I could place Carl's head on.



1st generation body for Carl
As you can see from this photo, the body is extremely simple.  It just needs to be able to support the head mounted on the shoulders and sit in a chair.  I wanted Carl to stand about as tall as a 6-year-old child so I went the the local Goodwill Store and purchased a set of clothes for a few dollars.  I got my measurements for the torso, arms and legs from the clothes.

Carl's hands 1st gen.
The most difficult thing to build where the hands.  I wanted something I could form into the shapes of hands and bend/mold as needed.  I found the solution in cutting up an old license plate I happened to have sitting around in the garage.  I'm sure any old sheet metal would work fine.
Use foam padding for realism.

Bolted to the chair and zip tied to the bucket.





No comments:

Post a Comment