by Joe Brown

To quote from Microsoft Office: “F-1 is the first of the 300/M series, built to serve. This robot is fully optimized for Office use.” Microsoft introduced the Office Assistant back in 1999, and many folks despised the annoying animated paperclip called “Clippy.” I did, too. Unlike many folk, I then scrolled through the choices of available Assistants and set the F-1 Robot as the default for my Microsoft Office. Hey, it’s cute, sometimes even funny, and not very annoying. I toyed with the idea of eventually building a model of the robot, so I added it to my infamous, ever-growing “to be scratchbuilt someday” list. When the Legs Contest was announced, it was an obvious choice to enter.

Construction: The odd scale of 9:1 comes from the fact that robot is not a scaleable image, so I took a screengrab of the robot and enlarged it up to what the finished size would be. Then, I began to gather materials. The body of the robot comes from a sheet of thick scrap styrene. This was cut into a shape that contained the front, top, and bottom of the robot. I gently used a torch to heat the plastic along previously marked lines and then carefully folded the heated plastic into right-angle bends.

The body sidewalls and a back plate were cut from the same plastic and attached. More of the same plastic was heat-smashed over wooden egg forms to construct the robot’s feet. The robot’s legs were liberated from an Episode One battledroid, and parts from an AT-ST were added to bulk them out. The AT-ST’s feet then became the aft bulges of my F-1 robot.

Part of the charm of the F-1 robot is in its varieties of expression. Since this was a nonelectronic (hence, nonmoving) model, I had to settle for more limited choices of expressions. There is a wide variety of big, googly eyes available from hobby and craft stores, so it was easy to locate the correct size. A thin sheet of styrene yielded the material for the robot’s mouth and eyebrows. I drilled small holes in the body and used a short finishing nail to attach these parts to the robot with superglue. The robot’s antenna has a base made from part of a plastic cone, and the wire came from the “Drawer of Odd Model Debris.”

For the legs, more holes were drilled in the robot’s sides and into the leg joints. Brass tubing made up the sockets for the legs and the axle through the robot’s body. Based on the colors that my computer screen gives me, I settled on the choices of light purple for the robot’s body, crimson for the legs, eyebrows and antenna bits, purple cut with white for the face, darker purple for the aft detailing, metallic blue for the bumps on the back end, and off-white for the robot’s feet. Applebarrel craft acrylic paints were used. The robot has a limited range of motion, which only give it a small number of poses, but it’s cool enough for me!

Image: Inspiration

Image: Making the feet

Image: Legs mounted

Image: Ooooo!

Image: Walking tall

Image: Right side

Image: Squat