Making a Steampowered Robot - Bolt

I wanted to created a Steampunk inspired robot design to get my students thinking about what they can build in Tinkercad.

I am going to try to show the build step by step so you can see the progress of my build. I used mostly basic shapes, and shape generators for this build.

Supplies

Tinkercad

Step 1: What Shapes Do We Want to Use?

I started out by sketching some ideas and roughing out the basics of what I wanted the robot to look like. I grabbed a bunch of parts that I thought would be good to use and dropped them all on the workplane and created a scrap pile.

Step 2: The Body

I started with a flattened cylinder for the base of my body. I want to make sure the top is larger than the bottom was why I chose this shape. I then applied a half sphere to the top and grouped it as a whole. The last part I did to get the body I wanted was to use a sphere as a hole and create a slot for the head.

A lot of the idea for this build is to create your own custom shapes using other shapes to manipulate basic shapes to create your own shapes and mechanics that work for your design.

Step 3: The Head

For the head I started out with a hi-res sphere. I then tilted a cylinder and used that as a hole to get the bottom jaw. I then used the scribble tool to make the bottom jaw have jagged teeth. I used a hi res sphere for the head and two more for the eye socked. I finished off the head with a long cylinder as a joint to hold the head in place.

Step 4: Making a Gauge

The next step I made was designing a gauge for the heart of the robot. I got a sphere and sandwiched it between two blocks to give it flat sides. I added a half sphere for the white. The numbers I used with the text tool. The red arch is an arch cut in half and the arrow is a cylinder with a square and triangle attached. I then added them to the robot and used cylinders and a sphere for the pipe.

Step 5: Creating Steam Pipe

I decided I wanted to add two smoke stacks on my robot. I started by creating two cylinders one larger one smaller and stacking them. I then added half a sphere to the top as a cap. I wanted some sort of vent so I used the Circular Array took to make a repeating shape. I sized everything to stack and aligned them. I created a second one and scaled it to be smaller and attached it to the back.

Step 6: Creating a Gear System

I wanted to do some details on the robot so i decided what better way to do that then to add some sort of makeshift gear system. I started with a half circle and added a metric gear over top and resized it to fit together. I ended up liking this shape and set it aside and we will copy and reuse this shape many times as a recurring system in our piece.

Step 7: Adding Arm Sockets and a Lower Torso

I used a cylinder for the shoulders and added the new gear system to each side. The bottom torso we are going to use the same shape we used for the body but we are going to scale it way down. I wanted to continue the gears. I added them in a the waist and scaled them to fin and I added some ball joints to the bottom and caped them off with more of our gears.

Step 8: Creating Hands

For the hands I decided to use a 4 fingered hand. I used only trapezoids. I started with the palm of the hand added the 3 fingers then added the thumb. Since there would be gaps I decided that I was going to use the Torus shape to be between all the joints and I was going to do this for some of the other areas to keep the robot more uniform.

I have a side by side of the hands with joins and without so you can see the different sides on how they joined.

Step 9: Legs and Arms

With the legs and arms I wanted to keep simple. We are also going to reuse those gears. The arms are made of a cylinder and I used those torus shapes again. I used the round roof for a binder shape. I did a constructed view and a view with everything apart so you can see how I constricted the piece.

Step 10: Creating Feet

With the feet I used those gears again and I used a couple of trapezoids and a triangle. I again did a deconstructed view and a constructed view to show how they go together.

Step 11: Adding Little Accessories

After looking at my robot I wanted to add a bunch of finishing touches.I added a little hatch to the back and a 2nd gauge. At this point you can add a lot of extra finishing touches and have fun with them.

Step 12: Finished Bolt