Pasta Bot Activate!

125mm tall

I finally finished my unsanctioned “fan-fic” entry for the 2025 Big Bot Bash. The deadline for the real participants was a month ago, so talking about it now I kind of feel like Jim Gaffigan doing his bit about bringing up old movies around the water-cooler: “I just saw Heat!” 

I made a lot of mistakes on this build and picked up some good experience. For every genuine lesson-learned I had two or three lessons-already-known-but-not-heeded-because-I’m-too-cheap/impatient. 

First off, the fragility of the build made me glue it to a base early in the process. I then proceeded to finish the robot before going back to work on the base. Not only was texturing and painting the base around the completed figure a pain, the glue bond on his feet seemed inadequate. So, lesson-relearned: spend as much effort designing and building the base, including a solid mounting plan for the figure, and get it maybe 95% done before joining the two.

Secondly, and stupidly for someone trying to meet a self-imposed deadline, I decided to try two different paint techniques I’ve never done before, namely the hairspray chipping method and an oil wash for weathering. The fact I no longer have an airbrush made the hairspray weathering decision extra silly. More on that in a second.

I primed the based figure in black, as shown last post. The rattle-can of Vallejo primer cost €12 but delivered beyond my expectations. I would’ve just got the cheapest black spray paint at the hardware store but I’m now living without a car and “popping down to the hardware store” is no longer the trivial activity it was.

The universe works in mysterious ways. I did a quick internet search for places with spray paint and discovered a plastic model kit store within 150 meters of my new apartment. I walk over there and I swear I could hear the angels sing… hands down it’s probably the best model shop I’ve ever been in, anywhere I’ve traveled in the world. It’s quaint and packed into like a 10 meter square space but the nice owner has everything I could need. Seemingly every color of acrylic paint from multiple brands, every variation of tool, etc. Amazing.

Anyways, the Vallejo primer went on incredibly smooth; like buttah. Zenithal highlights followed via dry brushing Vallejo Bone White from the top down. I brush-painted the entire build with a Gunmetal glaze mix, trying to preserve the highlights, and at this point, it looked pretty good. I hit it with a light coat of hairspray and let that dry for a few hours.

The plan was to paint it all bright red (Vallejo Blood Red), like a Kubota tractor, and then use the hairspray chipping method to make the metallic base coat show through at dings and dents. Missing my airbrush, I took a makeup brush normally used for dry brushing, and did the “overbrush” technique with slightly damp bristles and very little paint. While I’d rather have my airbrush back, this still worked surprisingly well to coat the robot in red; the coat was even but thin enough to let the metallic sheen through.

I rubbed off a little test patch of red paint with a wet toothpick, and the Gunmetal showed through. Perfect! Then, real-life intruded and I set the project aside for days, maybe a week.

I finally got back to the project and wet the toothpick to start weathering. Sadly, all the acrylic paint rubbed right off, all the way down to the black primer. Apparently, the long wait between the hairspray application and the weathering attempt allowed the hairspray to somehow integrate with the acrylic paint, instead of remaining a barrier between the Gunmetal and Red.

The inability to do the chipping took the wind out of my sails. I was already behind schedule so I skipped most of the planned detail paint work: insignia, bands, hazard stripes, etc.

The penultimate step before finishing the base, the oil wash, was also new to me so of course I made some mistakes. I slathered the wash, a thinned mix of black and burnt umber oil paints, all over the build and let it sit. I seem to remember different guidance depending on what internet resource one consults: some say wipe off the excess immediately, some say wait 24 hours and wipe. I let the wash sit for about 40 minutes before getting nervous and attempting to wipe it down. A little oil wash wiped off but the staining seemed permanent. Tips from the Discord group indicate that I could just use more white spirit thinner and reactivate the wash, in order to clean it up more.

I plan to leave the bot as it appears in the pictures. Yes, it turned out much darker than I imagined and the paint job lost its metallic sheen but I like the griminess. 

Half-ass attempts at insignia

I enjoyed this build immensely, even though I miss not having many of my tools.  I'm really looking forward to starting something new.

Making something just for the sake of making it, and not intending it for gaming, was refreshing.  I'm contemplating making a spaceship next, but not a ~60mm gaming piece like I normally do.  I'm thinking a vessel at least the size of this bot, maybe more.

Then again, making robots is just plain fun, and I'm really tempted to make something 50-80mm tall that I can use in a Mighty Monsters game.

What to do? 

Handy Hobby Tip: The Secret to Glue-free Hands…

…is to not use your hands.

Of course you have to use your hands when crafting. So, take the advice of one of my favorite YouTube crafters, the Crafsman, and “wear you some gloves”. We’ll come back to this.

Great glue!  But not on my hands

I bought 16 oz of Starbond Heavy Thin CA Glue‡ back in November. It’s great stuff but quite runny (by design). The glue arrived in a large shipping bottle, accompanied by four 2 oz refillable applicator bottles and a pack of micro-tip applicator attachments. I quickly found that bottle-to-bottle glue transfers and poorly seated applicator tips meant a crunked-up, gooey bottle. 

So, the post title may be click-baity, but I mean it when I say don’t use your hands when using super glue. More accurately, make a DIY, disposable glue brush.

Take a piece of thin steel wire and pinch it into a tight loop maybe 20mm long. Insert the wire into an Exacto-knife handle and form the “bristles” by wrapping the loop with masking tape. The masking tape extends about double the length of the wire, with its tip shaped by a couple of snips from some scissors. 

DIY Glue Brush

Once I’m ready to start bonding stuff with CA glue, I’ll put a couple of drops on a piece of non-porous scrap and then dab it with my DIY glue brush. The flexible masking tape tip makes it easy to apply tiny amounts of CA glue just where I want it, without the frustration of gluing pieces of the build to my fingers. I’ll make two or three of these masking tape brushes at the same time, and when the tip of one gets gunked up with glue, I’ll swap it for a new one. By the time I’m on the last brush tip, the CA glue on the first one is cured, and I’ll snip off the fouled area and be back to a fresh, if slightly shorter, glue brush.

Using this little glue brush I’m able to keep 90% of the super glue off my fingers. Repositioning a freshly glued piece, or handling a leaky glue bottle means I’m still going to get sticky fingers though, so it’s back to the gloves discussion, nitrile gloves specifically.

Pasta Bot says "half gloves still count."

I’m probably not alone in feeling that I lose some dexterity when wearing even thin nitrile gloves. My technique to preserving some dexterity is to leave a couple of fingers ungloved, preferably a non-dominant finger I don’t use reflexively, like the pinky or ring-finger. I find I don’t need to cut up my nitrile gloves to customize them; the poor quality control in their manufacture means that a glove is almost guaranteed to tear on the first doffing. Instead of tossing a torn glove, I’ll salvage the finger tips and reuse them repeatedly.

‡I don't get any kickbacks from Starbond, I just want to give praise where its deserved.  Great glue.

Big Bot Bash for Amateurs (Pasta Bot WIP)

A few years ago the YouTube Algorithm fed me the Bill Making Stuff channel when I was looking for terrain-building ideas.  The BMS channel introduced me to a number of other wargame-adjacent crafters, most notably Bill’s twin brother Dan, who runs the Dan Does channel.‡

Bill introduced the Big Bot Bash last March, and brought it back this year.  The BBB showcases a number of invited YouTubers, who each contribute their own unique take on the “Junkbot” concept exemplified by Bill Making Stuff.  As the name implies, a junkbot is a robot model scratchbuilt from “junk”, i.e. generally unrelated and repurposed objects.

The BBB challenge introduces a random element, by having the participants roll a d20 six times on the “Junkbot Generator”, found on Bill’s website for his own sci-fi setting, the Gutterlands.  Each roll on the Junkbot Generator assigns a specific aspect to the five different body areas and an overall robot “flavour”, with each die result vague enough to allow wide interpretation while still providing enough constraints and inspiration to prompt the scratchbuilder to start gluing.   

As a Patreon patron of the Dan Does channel (sorry Bill, money’s tight!), I have access to that channel’s Discord server, which hosts a slew of creative and lovely people.  A number of us patrons decided we’d unofficially join the BBB; while none of us run our own YouTube channel, we tried to stick to the same 28 March deadline that the pros were bound to.

***As an aside, you don’t need to be patron of either the Dan Does or Bill Making Stuff channels in order to join their respective Discord servers (Dan Does; Bill Making Stuff).  If you do toss them a few quid via Patreon however, you can get access to each server’s members-only section.  Either way, it’s a great way to meet like-minded crafters and I recommend it.***

A couple of the other Discord members made the deadline and their creations look awesome!  I’m truly blown away by the creativity and totally different perspectives and techniques everyone brought.  Obviously, based on the date of this post and its “Work-in-Progress” title, I’m way behind and still not finished with mine.  The build is done though and only the painting remains, so I feel safe enough to talk about it.  Posting now should hopefully give me some accountability to fully complete the build.

Anyways, let’s get on talking about my build.  I don’t feel too bad about missing the deadline, as I didn’t commit to making a junkbot and download the generator until around 15 March.  

OK, so anyone who’s seen this blog knows I like to build little spaceships out of pasta.  I’ve wanted to make other mechanical constructs from pasta for years and figured the Big Bot Bash was as good a time as any to try.  That meant, in addition to the constraints from the Junkbot Generator, I also forced myself to use pasta for a majority of the build.

Here’s my list of six rolls, followed by my initial thoughts/interpretations:

Section	D20 Roll	Result
Body	7	Heavy Smoker
Head	5	Hole
Arms	13	Fancypants
Hands	14	Two-handed
Legs	14	Centipede
Flavour	4	Beaten

I wasn’t exactly in love with a lot of the rolls but knowing the various pasta shapes I had on hand, coupled with Bill’s guidance to “Interpret the results how you like”, a few rough ideas immediately sprang to mind.

A “heavy smoker” body seemed easy enough, with all the tubular pasta shapes readily standing in for exhaust pipes.  I wasn’t sure what to do with “hole” for the head, so decided to come back to it.  I immediately decided that “fancypants” arms just meant overly complex, instead of frilly or ornate.  Hmmm, “two-handed” most obviously meant the robot bore some kind of two-handed weapon, but I rejected that.  Instead, I planned on each wrist ending in two hands.  I did not like “centipede” legs because it sounded like so much more work, a real pain.  I also didn’t like the idea of a long lower body with a lot of legs.  Turns out I went with the multiple legs configuration anyways.  Rolling “beaten” for flavour made me smile though, as that meant I could treat construction and painting mistakes as blemishes.

An idea formed quickly and I started gluing together pasta and wire in a vaguely humanoid shape.  I decided to make the overly-complex arms using three separate tentacles (each) that joined at a wrist unit.  The same wires for the arm tentacles passed through the body and splayed out into six separate tentacular legs.

The robot started to take shape and it screamed “mining bot”, like some piece of titanic but mundane equipment in a Chris Foss painting.  The “hole” result for the head could be the robot’s gaping maw, occupying its entire face (making for an easier build).  And a mining robot doesn’t need delicate hands, so the wrist units could feature claws.

Other than the wire armature and much baking soda accelerant, the entire build was, so far, various pastas held together with CA glue.  I started bulking it out using standard office paper and some vinyl sheeting, creating flat and smooth surfaces for later greebling.

The nature of those greebles caused me a bit of consternation.  I feel using anything other than found objects violates the pure spirit of a junkbot build.  The junkbot generator even states “no 3D prints”.  If you know me and my feelings toward 3D printing, you know there is no danger of printed parts showing up here.  Yet, I had to trash all the contents of my bits boxes in our recent move.

My second most favorite scratchbuilding technique, after gluing pasta, is casting my own greebles and nurnies in homemade, often single-use, impression molds.  I even took up valuable luggage space and weight during our move to hand carry my mold clay and casting plaster.  Still, I was reticent to use this technique, as it seems like an analog version of 3D printing.  I made peace with myself though, as I was doing all the mold creation from simple found-object shapes.

Keen-eyed readers will note that I strayed from the Junkbot Generator prompts in a few areas, most obviously the hands.  I wanted desperately to meet the (non-existent) deadline, and started cutting corners.  The first thing to go was the two claws per wrist idea. 

So, here’s the bot now, covered in greebles, secured to a base, primed, and waiting for paint.  Unfortunately, my airbrush set-up also stayed behind with our big move, so this guy will be purely brush painted.

‡All ideas from the Dan Does and Bill Making Stuff channels are the copyrights of their respective creators, used without permission, and with no intent to challenge.  I hope by featuring links to their channels/websites here, I can convince the reader to go check them out and maybe even support them on Patreon.  Thanks!