Making of Ninja Division’s Lug for Gen Con 2015 – Part 3

This picture was probably the first real robot’s making of pic I posted on my social medias in 2015.  I had not really promoted the making of that project, I had just been focusing on staying calm, not panicking and trying to make it happen.  Nobody really knew that I had spent the past months working on such a monster. I think that even the people of Ninja Division had not realized that what we had built was THAT big. But with me sitting on the robot’s shoulder, giving a clear idea of the robot’s proportions, our statue suddenly looked… impressive.    I was finally revealing to the world a project at a very advanced step in the building process, without any preview or warning, asking at the last minute for volunteers to help us finish the robot on time for Gen Con.

I know many radio hosts in Quebec City and it was easy for me to talk about the robot and ask for help on the radio. Some friends came to do some sanding for a few hours a day or 2… but it was obviously not enough to truly help. The deadline was close. And we had to deliver Lug for Gen Con, no matter what.

Out of nowhere came an email from a gentleman called Carol. He worked during 16 years in a shop where they were making fiberglass kayaks.  He knew how to do finishing sanding. He was already working full time, building his new house all by himself on the side AND he offered his help for the robot. He came to the workshop many times to help us as much as he could. And when we asked him why he had decided to help us since he was already so busy, he said that when  he was finishing his house’s roof on December at -20C, a guy he didn’t know offered his help. ‘I felt like it was my turn to help someone now’ he said.  Carol was our savior! Each time he would come to the workshop, my friend and I would feel less alone. We still had so much work to do, but at least, we had some help.

Ninja Division really needed to have Lug for Gen Con, even if it would have to be partially completed or not as beautiful as we would have liked it to be. They needed it NO MATTER WHAT. They wanted to have it so much that they offered us the opportunity to present a  ‘temporary’ Lug at Gen Con and to bring it back home to finish it to our taste. ‘You realize it means you’ll have to pay for transportation twice.  A round trip Quebec – Indianapolis, then another final shipping from Quebec to the USA. And you’ll pay for paint twice’  I said.  They wanted to unveil Lug at Gen Con so much that they were willing to pay.  My friend is such a demanding artist, he could only accept this opportunity to finish Lug later, even if it was a real sacrifice for him to present the robot at Gen Con while it wouldn’t be ‘perfect.’

The first thing we had to abandon in order to finish Lug on time was the base.  Lug wouldn’t have a beautiful decorated base and we would  just sand everything that still needed to be sanded as much as we could before painting.  4 days before leaving for Indianapolis, I remember I was falling asleeep while casting 8 fiberglass toes.

My friend’s uncle works in a garage as a professional painter.  We had never painted such a big object before.  I had used automotive paint for my fiberglass Candy costume, also for Ninja Division, many years ago. But it definitely didn’t compare to the huge task of painting a giant robot. Having a professional doing the paint for us was a release.  I was just very sad to think that we would then bring back Lug in our workshop and scrap the beautiful paint that my friend’s uncle would do. But we had no other choice now.

We were sanding and sanding, day and night, but we knew that at some point we would have to stop sanding and just start painting.  It was Monday morning, we hadn’t slept in 4 days.  At 9am, my friend’s uncle arrived at the workshop. Lug wasn’t properly sanded.  There was still bumps of bodyfiller, especially on the robot’s legs. But Gen Con was the following weekend and we had to drive down the robot to Indianapolis. We had to stop. And paint. Now. We stayed at the workshop while my friend’s uncle was applying the base coat, experiencing a strange mix of feelings. I was exhausted and disapointed.  I was happy to see though that automotive high coverage primer would fill up some of the latest little holes, hiding some little flaws.  Notice the paint fumes everywhere in my poor little workshop that was never meant to become a paint room…  At least, it was summer time, so we could work with the garage door open, taking the chance, however, that there might be some dust in the paint.

We should have waited a little longer before applying the coat of yellow paint. But we had no time.  We started looking at my friend’s uncle painting the robot in yellow… and we went to get the pick up truck and trailer I had rented to transport Lug to Indianapolis. I wasn’t driving. I was way too tired. I just went to sign the papers. I remember falling asleep in the car while we would bring back the pick up and trailer… and I finally went to bed.

We had choosen urethane car paint that didn’t need a clear coat. This paint is already very shinny and it dries pretty fast. It’s harder to do any retouch though if there’s any paint excess somewhere.  I was happy that a professional would be doing the paint step for me… while I would be sleeping.

Painting the robot was like a huge event.  Our friends and family were there. Everybody wanted to see the robot leave the workshop for its trip to the USA! When I came back to the workshop after a few hours of sleep, they had already started the masking process to hide the parts of the robot that we would leave yellow and prepare the parts that would be painted in dark gray. Again, it would have been better to wait a little longer before applying the coat of gray paint. But we had no time. As soon as I arrived, I started helping masking the robot so my friend’s uncle could start painting as soon as posisble.

When we left, the robot’s head wasn’t finished either. The yellow and gray were there, but the head had no eyes and no teeth.

But it was time to go… As soon as we could, we removed all the masking tape and plastic sheets and I called my neighboor.  That next step was actually the only simple part of the whole project. My neighboor at the workshop is a garage specialized in forklifts.  So I had a forklift next door. :D

So the pick up and trailer were waiting in front of the workshop. Over the trailer was a big box built by my father to protect the robot during transportation. I called my neighboor, he came with his forklift and we installed Lug on the trailer, in its transportation box. The paint on the robot was made in about one day. That night, my friend and I left the workshop with our robot, heading to Indianapolis. We had our passports, our luggages, I had my Betty costume and a lot of tools we would need to finish and install the robot’s head before Gen Con.  I started driving hoping that we wouldn’t have any trouble at the border.

Notice how simply the robot could be moved with a forklift. We welded large steel rectangular tubings in the robot’s base to allow a forklift to easily transport it.

We arrived at the border and I had huge doubts. I had asked to Ninja Division to provide me all the paperwork I would need to bring Lug to the USA and bring it back to Canada legally. After all, they’re a big company, they import products from China on a regular basis, they would know what to do and how it works better than I do. I was surprised when I saw what Ninja Division provided me. It was basically a printed mail saying that I was attending a convention in the USA. ‘It can’t be enough’ I said to my friend. ‘I can’t believe that we don’t need anything more. This isn’t even an official paper…’ But I was so tired while I was building the robot that I didn’t care and didn’t make any searches to see what I would really need, which was what they call a broker.

So here we are, at the American border. We drove through a big scanner. ‘You have kind of a huge robot inside, right?’ they asked. ‘Yes. It’s an exhibition piece. We bring it to a convention in the USA, then we’ll bring it back to Canada.’ And just as I thought, I didn’t have any of the official papers I needed to export that thing to the USA. But we were lucky. We met what I wouldn’t have expected to exist: a nice American customs officer. Maybe it’s because we looked very miserable, even if I have doubts that it would influence any customs officer, but he was very friendly. He explained us that if it would have been a sale, if we had planned to leave the robot in the USA, someone would have needed to pay duty taxes on it. But we were actually bringning it to an event with the intention to bring it back to Canada. In both cases, we needed papers that we didn’t have. We were not allowed to enter the USA. It was Tuesday morning, maybe between 5am and 6am.

The customs officer told us he would write a letter stating that we stayed in the US secured zone, that we didn’t cross the border and that we were allowed to go back to Canada with our inspected cargo. He sent us back to the Canadian border with our letter… and we were back to Canada. Gen Con was next Thursday.

In Canada, we were told that we needed a broker to export something to the USA. We contacted the people from Ninja Division to inform them that we got stuck at the border because the papers they had provided us were not what was required. They really looked surprised. I realized at that moment that our friends at Ninja Division, and with all due respect, American Citizens in general, have no idea of how complicated it is for non US Citizens to cross the US border, with or without a cargo, even as a simple tourist. My friend and I were told that there were brokers offices at the border. They would open at 8am or 9am, in a few hours. We would wait, go see one of  these brokers, put them in contact with Ninja Division and see what would happen.

We waited there for a few hours and we had to fill up many papers to list and describe everything we were transporting with us to the USA that we would bring back to Canada at our return. The goal is to prove that we didn’t buy any of these things while we were visiting the USA, because we’d have to pay duty taxes on those things while entering Canada. We had to prove that these objects were purchased (or built, in the case of our robot) in Canada, that we had these things with us when we left Canada and that we would bring them back with us to Canada.

In the meanwhile, I guess that someone at Ninja Division did something somewhere, maybe they contacted a broker, because at some point, we were apparently allowed to cross the border and we didn’t have to meet a broker. So we left with a letter stating that we were brigning our cargo from Canada to the USA and that we would bring it back to Canada.  We would have to show that letter at the Canadian border at our return. We finally crossed the US border. Welcome to USA, robot.

The trip from Lévis to Indianapolis is a 16 hours drive. It was an extremely hot summer and it would become warmer and warmer as we would go South. My friend and I drove while the other was sleeping and we had to stop regulary because soon enough, none of us would be able to drive anymore. We had had so little sleep in the previous days… It’s honestly a miracle that we could make it safe to Indianapolis. It took us 36 hours to do a 16 hours drive because we had to stop to sleep so often. With our pick up and huge trailer, the vehicle was too long to use regular parkings, so we would park between the big trucks in truck stops.  We lived a trucker’s life for a few days. We finally arrived in Indianapolis on Wednesday early in the morning. I remember we waited until 6am or 7am before calling someone at Ninja Division to inform them that we had made it. Now, what should we do? I used to attend convention as a guest or simple attendee. My luggages, my banner and my little person. Easy to handle. But as an exhibitor with a huge display piece to deliver, what should I do? Where should I go? How does it work? May I remember that my friend and I had been on the road for 36 hours, after some very intense days of physical work and very little sleep? We were happy to finally be in Indianapolis, but it was the beginning of another challenge.

We asked questions to the little people we met around the convention center so early in the morning. We were told to go to a certain place where all the exhibitors could park their trucks. Once there, we could ask to other exhibitors what to do. We had to go to a little trailer that was like a ‘front desk’. I mentioned I was with Ninja Division, they gave me the booth number and which loading dock was the closest to our booth. This is where we would have to go when it would be our turn and they would send over a forklift. We would have 30 minutes to unload the robot and bring it to our booth in the convention center. I gave my cellphone number and we went back to the pick up, waiting to be called.

2 hours later, I got a phone call and we went to the loading dock. We unloaded the robot and brought all the tools and our luggages with us. We brought back the pick up to the exhibitors’ parking and walked back to the convention center. It was so warm outside, the sun was so strong, I felt like sun had never been that strong in Quebec even during summer time. Or maybe it’s just because I was so tired. We walked into the convention center, installed the rubber rugs that would cover the unfinished base and installed the robot’s toes. The head was still unfinished, though. ‘If you don’t need me anymore, I’d go to my hotel room now’ I said to Ninja Division’s crew. I took the robot’s head and went to the hotel, finally. I had never been so happy to take a shower. It was Wednesday afternoon.

I wanted to ask my friend some help to finish the robot’s head, but he was apparently already sleeping and impossible to wake up. We had stolen a cardboard box in the convention center to use it as a paint booth in the hotel room. I had masking tape (the real fancy one for automotive paint) spray paint, a small silicone mold that my friend had made before leaving to cast small eyes for the robot, body filler… I really felt like if I had brought all my workshop with me. I taped a pattern on the robot’s teeth and chin and sprayed silver paint in front of my improvised paint booth, hoping that the maid wouldn’t see some silver fume on the walls and carpet the following day. I catalysed a small quantity of bodyfiller that I put in the silicone mold, casting 2 small button shaped eyes for the robot, that I painted in black and put on the head using simple double sided tape. That’s the best I could do with the energy I had left. I called my friends from Ninja Division to tell them I wouldn’t go have dinner with them. I was too tired. I just went to bed. It was Wednesday night.

Thursday morning. I woke up early because we still had to go install the robot’s head before Gen Con’s beginning. My friend was panicking because he wasn’t sure if what he had planned as an attachement would work. We simply screwed a piece of 2X4 on the robot’s torso, where the head would be. The 2X4 would be completely hidden by the robot’s neck. The top of the neck would actually hold on top of the 2X4. I climbed on the robot and put 2 long screws through the robot’s neck and through the 2X4. It should be strong enough. And here’s the selfie I proudly made in front of my robot, with its head! :D

Here’s the version of Lug we were able to deliver for Gen Con 2015, with the unfinished base. But I was still very proud. :) I took this picture before going back to my hotel room Thursday morning.

My friend went back to sleep. But my day had just started. I had to put makeup on and put my Betty costume on. Because Gen Con was about to begin!

I don’t know how I did to survive to 4 convention days after all this… Months of hard work, an adventure at the US border, a first experience as an exhibitor in a major convention… Finally, when I think of it, standing in front of my robot in costume, even for many hours and days in a row, even with tons of makeup and fake lashes on, explaining to everybody how I built my robot, was the easiest and more pleasant part. :)

I wish I could say ‘THE END.’ But we actually had to bring back the robot to Canada, finish to sand it properly, build a base and do the paint again… Remember? Coming up next, Part 4: a paint story!

Making of Ninja Division’s Lug for Gen Con 2015 – Part 2

Here it is! Part 2 of Lug’s Making of blog! I’m so excited about this blog that I’ve been wanting to write for so long! And things are about to get exciting too because we reached a point where the robot started to look like… a robot! lol

I mentioned in Part 1 how this robot had a design that was obviously not meant to be built in real. With a very large upper body holding on small legs, we were expecting to have some problems. We had already started at that point inserting inside the fiberglass pieces a metallic structure that would hold the pieces together and that would make the robot stable. But we were afraid that 2 metallic square tubings hidden inside the robot’s legs and welded to a metallic base might not be enough to make the robot stable.  The robot would sure be very stable if you’d try to push on its side to make it move from left to right. Nothing could happen. But what if someone would push on the front or back of the robot? Could it kind of slightly ‘balance’ with all that weight from the upper body? It appeared to us that we had no other choice than adding a third metallic tubing coming out from the back of the robot to form a triangle with the 2 other tubings hidden in the legs.  We pierced a whole with a buffer into the robot’s butt and my friend’s brother welded that extra third support. This is probably  one of fiberglass only advantages, with the fact that it’s cheap. You can make holes in a fiberglass object and patch it and with some bodyfiler and proper sanding, the patch will never show off once painted. On the next pics, you can see the robot standing on the 3 metallic tubings that were welded to its ‘skeleton’ and welded to the rectangular base on the floor.

Then on the next pic, we had started fitting the robot’s knees and calves pieces around the metallic tubing.

Now let’s talk about a small, but very important piece: the robot’s head.  It was too small to be built using the same 2 inches thick styrene sheets that we had used for all the other body parts. So we used 1/8 inch thick masonite sheets. My friend sliced the 3D model of the robot’s head using that same software, 123D Make. Many, many shapes of slices that we printed on paper, glued on the masonite sheets and cut with a band saw.  Then we stacked all the slices together to form a very heavy head that we sanded and molded.  On the next pics, you can see the original head made with the masonite slices once it was sanded and painted with primer, ready to be molded. The second pic is the inside of the silicone mold.

And here’s the fiberglass casted head placed on top of a styrene neck that we would later also cover with fiberglass.

At that point, we had started doing finishing sanding on some of the robot’s pieces, while other pieces still needed a lot of work. Since we built the robot in separate pieces that needed to be assembled, it added a lot of work to the whole process. Everywhere you add fiberglass mat to hold 2 pieces together, you need more bodyfiller and more sanding.

Here’s a closeup of the torso. The green bodyfiller was a finer one to do finishing sanding. By the way, there are many different colors of bodyfiller hardeners, so you could see different fiberglass projects around showing different colors of bodyfiller. It depends on the brands. By the end of this project, I was pretty tired of seeing shades of blue, because my bodyfiller’s hardener was blue.  Seeing that spot of green was surprisingly exciting for me!

In the robot design, there was many cylinder shapes of various sizes. Instead of trying to sculpt them, we thought it would be easier to reach perfect shapes if these pieces were made on a lathe. This is when my friend had that genius idea that I would later use again in my costuming projects. He casted various Smooth-On Smooth-Cast cylinders and we realized that some of these products were very easy to sculpt on a wood lathe. Plus, they have a slick surface at the end, perfect to be molded!  Here are some pics of the original casted Smooth-Cast block with a tip that can fit into my wood lathe, a block on the wood lathe ready for work, one of the silicone molds with its fiberglass shell and the final fiberglass casted pieces that we would add to the robot following the design.

Lug’s huge forearms were a lot of work. A lot of sanding and a lot of thinking. These pieces were so heavy that they couldn’t obviously hold to the rest of the robot only with fiberglass. Polyester resin alone is weak. Cast a piece of polyester resine alone, drop it on the floor and it will break. That’s why we reinforce it with fiberglass mat or cloth. Fiberglass is strong, but it can still break. We knew that the weight of the forearms would certainly make the joins at the ‘shoulers’ break. Hey, we’re building a statue meant to decorate a booth in a convention, a statue so big that people will be able to walk under its arms. There’s no way I’m gonna be responsible of someone’s death because the arms of the robot I built broke and felt on someone’s head. So we had no choice but inserting more metallic support inside the forearms to weld them with the metallic core inside the robot’s torso.

Here are some closeups of the forearms and the way we held them in the air, using some interlocking blocks again. We placed the forearms in position to be able to insert and weld the metallic structure in them.

A view from the side.  Again, we had to do a surgery to our robot, cutting a huge hole in its forearms to have enough room to insert and weld a metallic structure inside. By chance we had my friend’s brother. He’s a very good welder and he was able to figure out a way to make this unconventional project work. Many welders are only able to weld simple shapes on a flat table. For the robot, my friend’s brother had to find solutions to put together pieces in different angles, welding in different positions, definitely not an easy job.  Anybody who knows welding will look at this and see how complicated it was. And yet, it worked. It’s certainly not the fanciest welding job you’ll get to see in your life, but it was properly made welding and it was strong. That’s all we needed.

Now you can see how we patched the hole in the forearms using fiberglass mat. To avoid creating extra thickness around the piece, where the join is, we used a buffer to sand down around the hole and around the piece, creating some room to put the extra fiberglass mat. The join has to be even. At the end, you don’t want to see or feel it under the paint.

More closeups of the forearms once they were installed and a closeup of our robot’s belly, which was also a lot of work. We had to do the same type of ‘surgery’ on its abdomen, cutting a hole to weld the metallic structure inside and patching the whole thing.  I remember that we sanded that part a lot. We sanded everything a lot.

And all of a sudden, with its arms on, our huge robot became gigantic. It was so large! We had created a monster! It was during summer, since Gen Con in August was coming up, and we were working with the garage door of the workshop open.  Everybody in the industrial park would stop by to see what was that giant thing standing in the middle of the workshop.  Lug was a superstar, being taken in pictures even before he arrived in convention! lol

We were actually supposed to deliver Lug in May or June, I don’t remember anymore, for a first convention that Soda Pop Miniatures wanted to attend. Then they wanted to bring Lug to a second convention in July and finally bring it to Gen Con in August.  We were never able to finish Lug on time for the 2 first conventions. We were very sorry to keep Soda Pop Miniatures from taking advantage of this statue for 2 conventions, but we were working day and night. We couldn’t go faster.  Then I received a phone call from one of the people in charge at Soda Pop Miniatures  saying that they really, really needed to have Lug for Gen Con, no matter what.  And I totally understood the idea. I wanted more than anything to finish Lug on time for Gen Con. ‘Can you give me another budget so I could hire people to help us building Lug?’ I asked.  They couldn’t. I couldn’t afford to hire people to work with me either. ‘I’ll try to find volunteers’ I said. And this is the first making of picture that I posted on my social medias in 2015, finally sharing with the world what I had been working on for months, asking if someone, somewhere, would be willing to come to the workshop and help me working on the robot for free so we would finish it on time for Gen Con.

You already know that we managed to deliver Lug on timfor Gen Con… but if you want to know how we did it, don’t miss Part 3 of my Making Of blog! :D

Making of Ninja Division’s Lug for Gen Con 2015 – Part 1

Celebrating my 10-year career, I couldn’t review everything I made through the past years without mentioning the giant fiberglass statue I built in 2015! It’ s been a long time since I’ve been wanting to write a Making Of blog about this project. Better late than never. :)

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Betty and Lug the robot are 2 characters from Ninja Division – Soda Pop Miniatures’ tabletop game Relic Knights. 2 miniatures that a friend of mine and I decided to bring to life.

In 2015, we undertook what would be the most demanding and complicated project we had ever made: building a giant fiberglass statue. It took 7 months to the 2 of us to build this thing from scratch, using styrene, covering the whole thing with polyester resin and fiberglass mat, welding a metallic structure inside with the help of my friend’s brother and using automotive paint with the help of my friend’s uncle. Lug isn’t a very well known character and I was too busy building it to advertise and promote its making of properly. Most of people don’t realize all the work hidden behind that giant when they see it in picture, the hundreds of hours of sanding required to make the robot as slick as glass. I got less recognition building this thing than the average teenager cosplayer gets making bikini cosplay costumes. It was a very humbling experience that taught me one thing: in life, you have to make your own projects for yourself. Never make something hoping that people will like what you did or will love you. Life isn’t a popularity contest. It’s an opportunity to accomplish great, nice, beautiful things YOU will be proud of.

And I’m proud of Lug, even if it wasn’t perfect. I’m about to share with you what was the biggest technical challenge of my life as a prop maker. I did many mistakes, I learned a lot of things. Here’s how my friend and I built that fiberglass statue from scratch in 100 making of pics.

When my friend and I started making searches to know how big fiberglass statues were made, we discovered that professionals were working from styrene sculptures, either sculpted by hand or by a CNC cutter following a 3D model. Big styrene blocks are expensive, just as CNC cutting services. The only styrene we had financially access to was the styrene sheets they still sell in our hardware stores in Quebec. These white sheets used to be used for houses insulation. Now we use a different type of styrene sheets to do that, but these old sheets are still available and pretty unexpensive.

We asked Ninja Division to provide us a 3D model of Lug and my friend found online a free software called 123D Make.  This software allows you to slice up a 3D model.  In order to be able to use the styrene sheets rather than styrene blocks, we sliced Lug’s 3D model, printed the slices on paper, glued each slice on the styrene sheets, cut them with a jigsaw and stacked the styrene slices on top of each other to form the robot’s body parts. We were so naive. A ridiculous, cheap, ambitious way to build a giant statue.

As you can see on the pic, putting each slice of styrene on top of each other and working with 2 inches thick sheets didn’t  gave us perfect shapes.  There was those little ‘steps’ or corners we had to sand down using a plaster rasp. Easy, almost funny step to do. But it created tons of styrene pellets. Pellets everywhere, turning my workshop into a life size snow ball. I found styrene pellets in every corner of my workshop months after the robot was finished.

But that was the easy part. We knew that polyester resin would make our styrene shapes melt if we would apply it directly on the styrene. But how could we possibly protect the styrene? At the time, we run many tests, tried a large variety of products before we eventually found out that professionals who use polyester resin for such a project simply cover the styrene with aluminium foil. If you knew everything we tried… :(

So we had all the pieces of our robot. Separate styrene pieces. We started to cover each styrene shape with fiberglass mat pieces soaked in polyester resin, using a brush. Very long process.  We later saw online fiberglass airguns, a system like a paint gun, but it throws shreded fiberglass mat and resin at the same time instead of paint, allowing to cover big surfaces very quickly. That’s what they use to make fiberglass bathtubs and boats. Such a system isn’t cheap, though, and just like the big styrene blocks, it didn’t match the budget that Ninja Division had given us. I didn’t plan to become a company specialized in the making of giant fiberglass statues. My goal wasn’t to invest into such a device. So we did everything with our little hands, using an infinite amount of brushes. And we started covering our robot’s body parts with fiberglass mat and polyester resin.

On the first picture, you see the robot’s thighs, crotch and styrene, not yet covered abdomen. On the second picture, you can see the biggest part of all, the robot’s torso. Notice the life size print of the robot’s 3D model on the wall. We would always refer to it while working to see if our shapes were looking good.

Fiberglass projects are unique in the fact that they look like shit until the very end, when you think your shape is good enough to apply a first coat of primer and see how it looks. Until then, it was just bumps, body filler, shades of blue (my body filler hardener was blue) and a lot of despair. This project was my introduction to the world of automotive products like body filler, paint and other (boring) stuff the seamstress in me would have never been interested in otherway. That whole project really took me out of my comfort zone. I really had no idea of what I was doing. And I learned.

I quickly learned that fiberglass and polyester resin were heavy. The robot’s torso soon became too heavy to be easily manipulated. Plus, we realized that this giant statue would need a metallic internal structure to hold.  This design, with its big torso and arms, but small legs, wasn’t meant to be built in real. How would it hold? And how would we put a structure into our shapes filled up with styrene? It became obvious that we would have to take off the styrene from our fiberglass shells.  More styrene pellets. More and more.

We built the robot in a strange way, in separate pieces that we later assembled together to insert a metallic structure inside instead of building the pieces around a structure.  It’s like if we had made things in the wrong order. But we didn’t know… We improvised a lot.

On the next pictures, you can see the first metallic structure that we inserted into the empty torso. There were many challenges with the robot’s shape. The legs were small and needed to support the weight and balance of a bigger upper body. The forearms were very big too and they were connected to the torso by tiny arms. We inserted a triangle made of 2’’ X 2’’ square tubing.  One part of the triangle would come out from the robot’s waist and the other part would cross the torso through plywood pieces glued in the robot’s armholes with fiberglass. We added pieces of fiberglass mat to hold in place both the metal and the plywood so everything would be very strong and couldn’t break. This metallic triangle would be used to weld the rest of our robot’s skeleton.

The metallic structure coming out from the robot’s waist actually split the opening in half. One last weld needed to be done inside the torso and my friend, who had done all the welding so far, couldn’t make his way into the torso anymore. Yeah, he’s too fat! lol My friend’s brother could have entered and do it for us, but he wouldn’t be available before the evening. We couldn’t wait for him for all these hours and we needed that step to be done to be able to move on. We had no other choice. I had to practice welding until I was able to do a small weld and I went into the torso to do the welding.  Here I am coming out from the torso.

This is when I realized that all that fiberglass dust produced while sanding was very easy to set on fire. Welding and fiberglass dust don’t go well together. :S After I extinguished a small flame made by welding sparkles in fiberglass dust using my leather glove, I was very happy to get out from that fiberglass torso/jail.  From now on, we would remove as much as possible of the fiberglass dust before welding and we kept some water and the fire extinguisher close each time we would weld inside our fiberglass friend.

Assembling more and more pieces together. Here I am in my sexy clothes trying to fit the abdomen of the robot with its crotch.

We finally thought that it might be easier to fit the robot’s crotch with its thighs first. To reproduce the original design, we used a mix of ABS pipes and other types of flexible pipes of various sizes. We pierced holes in fiberglass to insert some of the pipes. At the end, all the pipes were glued in the fiberglass structure using more fiberglass mat. Nothing could break and the final look, with the gap between the robot’s crotch and thighs filled up with pipes, was exactly like in the 3D model that was provided to us.  I was pretty satisfied with how it looked.

Now, a big challenge. How would we place the robot’s legs under its torso? The torso was way too big and too heavy, especially now that it had the metallic structure inside, to be lifted and manipulated, even by many people.  With the help of my friend’s brother, we lifted up the robot’s torso on some interlocking blocks, using the tubing that was coming out from the robot’s armholes.  It was honestly not the safest move we did.

Here’s my friend’s brother doing more welding.

While the torso was holding like this, we were able to attach the crotch and thighs with the torso. But how would we add the calves and feet? We had to find a way to lift up the torso even higher.

My workshop is in an industrial park. I asked to the owner of the building the permission to pierce a hole in the ceiling. We installed in the roof a metallic tubing that would cross the roof’s trusses. To this, we attached a chain and a chain block like the ones mechanics use to lift up a car’s engine. And this way, we were able to lift our giant robot in the air.

Our first plan was to build the robot in a way so it could be disassembled and transported in pieces. Then we realized that each piece was so heavy that they couldn’t be manipulated by anybody the day of the convention. We finally decided to build the robot in one big piece.

When we built the robot, we didn’t really considered how tall it would be vs how it would be transported from one place to another.  We just chose a scale and the robot turned out to be more than 10 feet tall. However, the maximum height to go under the average overpass on a highway in North America is 13’ and a few inches… Which means that if Lug was to be transported standing, it would have to be on a low trailer.

That metallic structure in the back of the torso was part of a first idea we had developed to be able to flip the robot on its back to carry it around more easily.  But the deadline was coming up soon and we were missing time. We later abandoned that idea. The robot would be transported standing, as it is, lifting it by its base with a forklift.

Here are many closeups of different pieces of the robot as we would sand each piece and assemble them together.

On the next picture, you can see one of Lug’s big forearms. That line that goes around the forearm was actually very hard to make. Before we realized that professionals would use aluminium foil to cover and protect styrene from polyester resin, we tried a whole bunch of different products.  When we did the forearms, we covered the styrene with a product that seemed to resist to polyester resin and we later saw that the resin’s fumes had made the styrene melt under the coat of product we had applied. The line around the forearm was all uneven and full of bumps. I had to correct and build the shape using a lot of body filler, applying a big quantity of it with my spatula. Then just before it would set, when it would still be soft, I would cut the shape and perfect angles with an X-ACTO blade. I called it body filler sculpting. Not the ideal way to go, but I had no other choice.

These are Lug’s fingers that we roughly sculpted in styrene before covering everything with fiberglass mat and polyester resin.

And this is one of Lug’s huge thumbs.

That’s is for Part 1 of Lug’s Making of! Part 2 is coming up in a few days!