Tin Man Tom

The first quarter of 2023 has been a busy one for me, with three Meccano club meetings and many new models built. With bad weather lately I opted to stay indoors, and what better way to keep busy than more Meccano building!

So I thought, “What shall I build this time?” A couple of ideas came to light and the one of building a cycling robot was the one I took further. After my Space Invader robot I needed to be sure that this new one would be quite different with new ideas built into it.

I first built the moving rib mechanism and inserted it into the new square body. The head followed along with the two new arms and fittings.

The idea of the legs cycling was part of the building of this model, but I needed to fit the whole structure to a leg or supporting flat platform as it was very heavy and pedalling would not be very practical. So this supporting unit to hold the full weight should be very strong and would also help me in attaching the rotating drums for the pedals and its legs.

I already built the main motor and driving system to move the head and arms and it was tested and working great. Now I needed another motor and gearing unit for the pedalling system. This was rather tricky and difficult since I only had about six inches of space between the four supporting legs attached to the base, so getting a motor and reducing gears in was rather problematic. After trying and trying I came up with the final result and I was able to fit it in the right position into that small space, with a long axle from the motor operating the two drums where the articulated legs are attached. Many adjustments and changes were made until all the movements were right.

Finally a new idea came about and it was the removal of the supporting base to be replaced with a bigger and stronger one, where I attached six wheels so the model can be pulled from one place to another, but I thought to add a rotating unit built with circular plates and balls so the robot can be manually turned in any direction from its standing position, so it can be displayed at many angles.

It has been a difficult model, it took me 12 days to build it, but it did make me work quite a lot harder than many of my other bigger models.