Our Silent Hill Head project was another Halloween project that we undertook in ’21. We created her for two main reasons: 1.) we don’t like wasting things, and the broken drone parts were just going to end up being thrown away otherwise, and 2.) we also wanted to show that you can build a robot out of literally anything you have laying around.
She was made almost entirely out of spare parts. Her chassis is made out of lollipop sticks, her wheels are from an old RC car we has lying around, her head is a polystyrene head we found online and fell in love with, her nurse’s cap is made out of cardboard and covered with some fabric we found, and she is powered using spare drone parts from a small aircraft that was having trouble staying in the air.
She works almost perfectly fine, but her wheels have never sat right. They needed gluing down properly to the motors, but because the shaft is much thinner than the hole in the wheels, it’s never worked as well as we’d like. We tried using hot glue when we first made her. We were much too scared to use super glue in case we got it wrong and damaged the motors. Now, however, it seemed like it was our only option. Hopefully it’ll hold and sit better this time. You can see how we modified the wheels to fit, on her dedicated page here: Silent Hill Head
We also started painting her properly. I’d say we were probably more nervous about this stage, than actually building her, as it would be the thing that would make or break whether she looked as we intended or not. Regardless, we sat down and started to paint her. We used varying shades of grey, and a lot of coffee to try and show degradation, (yes, actually coffee). Along with the bright red patches all over her, her piercing dragon eye, and a dirty nurse’s hat, she definitely looks scarier than she did before.
At least Terror Ted is not alone now.
Moral of the story: being scared of doing something you’re not used to, or haven’t done before is a perfectly normal thing that everyone experiences. The best thing to do is to give it a go anyway.
Cerys
#RoboticsIsForEveryone
