Nerd of all trades from New York City.

he/him 💙💜🩷

Original content [OC] of mine which I post here is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • The MST3K bots were originally built for the show using various random toys and household items. There has been a “bot building” scene of fans dedicated to collecting those bot parts and replicating the show’s bots for ages, and that community has always traded parts and part replicas matching the show’s bots among themselves. (I get the sense home 3D-printing has taken over for most of the demand for bot parts nowadays, but that wasn’t yet a thing when I did this in the early 2000s.)

    There used to be quite a few websites and forums about the bots and their components. The only ones from those old days I still see online are this one and this one.

    For Servo I tracked down and modified the same candy dispensers they used for his head. His torso, arms, and hands are resin-cast copies of matching originals sourced from a fellow bot builder, his shoulders and the black trains along his bowl are vacuformed plastic sheets a fellow bot builder fabricated using matching original parts as molds, and the bowl and other mechanics were things I had found or made myself.

    20something years later I stripped out the internal puppetry mechanics, transforming the puppet to a static statue. I changed the bowl, and installed lamp wiring from a home lamp-rewiring kit. The bulb is an Alexa-compatible smart bulb, situated at the bottom of his clear globe, and I filled the globe with clear glass marbles. I have him set up to switch on in the afternoon with the rest of the lights around the house, and he changes color every hour until it’s time to switch off in the evening.

    I then tested the whole thing safely to ensure the wiring was intact and safe, and checked that the whole thing doesn’t get hot under normal use. All is well!