One of the things that Mr. The Wombat suggested during LCTC was the idea of having little Artie and BBL-BBQ action figures in packaging similar to the Kenner 3.75″ figures from our youth.
I’ve encountered the idea of custom figures before but I hadn’t considered doing it for my Hardware Wars robots. Though in fact I know someone out there has done a custom 4-Q-2 figure.
I have arting skills, I have a 3d printer. Naturally, I have to do it…
I started with the card backs. I’m not going for full cloning of the Kenner look, just something loosely inspired by it. Here’s Artie Deco.
And here’s BBL-BBQ…
Astute readers may have realized that I’m trolling my fellow Star Wars fans a bit with those images. (Look at the fonts for “Hardware Wars” and imagine a voiceover by William Shatner….)
The front side needs a few enhancements — curving off the corners of the black section, enhancing “Fosselius” to be more reminiscent of the classic Kenner logo — but these are fairly minor tweaks. I also have the reverse side of the card for Artie Deco in progress, but I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll hold off for now.
So what about the actual figures? Well, like I said, I have a 3D printer.
Surprisingly, about three years ago I came across an official model of the Hoover Constellation, posted by Hoover themselves. It’s a nice model but unfortunately, the proportions are not terribly accurate. The mesh is also not well-oriented or set up for printing, and it’s scaled way too large for my purposes. But I removed the toggle switch, scaled the model down and sliced it into sections, added holes for alignment pins, and gave it a go.
I think I used a scale factor of 0.2359. It came out a bit smaller than I really wanted, though, and the proportions bugged me even more in reality than they did on the computer.
So I instead made my own model in Fusion and printed that:
I sized it roughly 50% larger than the first print. That makes him slightly more than an inch tall, which feels like a much better size, though its not strictly to scale with typical action figures.
2019-04-10: As promised, I’m adding photos of the prints.
On the left is my new model of BBL-BBQ, and on the right is the thingiverse model of the Hoover. You’ll have to forgive the paint job on the thingiverse model; my orange acrylic is rather old and chunky. The proportion issues are due to the small size of the body relative to the other parts (handle, equator, and base). The newer model on the left was spray painted.
A few days later, I was planning to revise the handle on top to make the fin a bit more prominent. Then it occurred to me that I actually have orange and white filament. All I would need to do to save myself some printing would be to separate that ridge around the equator into a separate part (then the only painted bits are the faceplate and the eye).
Then things got a little out of hand…
The old prototype is on the back left, the new one on the back right. On the front row we have new friends B00-BQ, BLU-BOI, and BUM-BLB (tentative names).
B00-BQ was inspired by Disney’s halloween-themed droids R2-B00, R3-B0017, and R4-B0018.
Now I need to actually make a model of Artie Deco, where the same thing will probably happen. I already have a list of alternate space drone names based on Artie (like Artie Noveau, who I mentioned in the last post).
dyne3d 