I've made many things with my Volkswagen Kombi camper van set - most of these have been with the help from designs from Rebrickable. If you don't know it it's a website were people post their own designs for Lego sets including Alternative designs for a single set. Basically with the parts from that single set what can you make.
Now I like a retro style robot so when I saw one as a rebuild of the Volkswagen Kombi then I was all up for it. Unfortunately It didn't go quite as planned. The design was clearly done using a computer program rather than in the real world so when you went to build it - well it didn't really go smoothly. It broke apart about 5 or 6 times whilst I was build and when you got the finished product it just wouldn't stand up. I was frustrated, but I decided I would fix it.
The Kombi - which is the donor set
Now I was happy with the face - it was impressive, silver hubcaps become eyes and ears. Indicator lights pupils. The Antenna are the exhaust pipes from the Kombi. This was good, everything else had to go.
I started by rebuilding the legs. Retro robot legs are easy, basically some feet (easy - they are the curve roof panels from the van) and then just a heaps of 2X2 plates and you have yourself a two sturdy, never going to fall over legs.
The body is also simple enough, it's red bricks and there were plenty of this to be had. Every Retro robot needs a control panel on the chest, you need to build the body with some joining bits at the front and then you build and panel on plate, place it on and away you go. On the panel you need random things that lot futuristic in a 1950's way. The clock works, as does some of the gauges from the dashboard, throw in some random lights vents and knobs and you are ready to go. The door handles from the Kombi become the vertical bars which I think add to it.
Arms are always the trickiest part. Most famous TV and Movie Robots have skinny little arms (because and here is a secret, there is just a man inside the robot suit and it's his arms) so some flexible hoses which were in the engine of the car work well, and some clips for hands, just like Lost in Space (Danger!!)
You can just see the flexible hoses on each side in this shot of the Kombi's engine.
and then the head, what you can't see is that this head is solid now. All in all I'm really happy with this build - it's robust - I mean it took my 5 year old neices all of 4 minutes before they broke it and I think it looks cool
