Ever sine creating my scratch built tripod I wanted to have a go at another scratch build. Only this time I wanted to try and see if I could create a whole army and costing next to nothing. I thought the best option would be to create some sort of machine, robot, walker style miniature. To keep the costs down I felt it would need to be made from the sort of cheap plastic components you can buy in large quantities on places like Ebay.
I started putting random words into Ebay like 'plastic', 'connector', 'plug' in combination with terms like '50pcs' or '100pcs'. The parts those searches came up with allowed me to create three different versions of a three legged Spiderbot..
The components I settled on were plastic Rivet Fasteners (100 for £5) for the body, Jack Plug Stoppers (100 for £4) for legs, Dupont Jumper Wire Cable Housing (100 for 99p) for the weapons, False plastic toenail tips (500 mixed sizes for £1.44) to act as armour/knee pads, LED Spacers (100 for £1.65) for the eyes, Plastic washers (50 for £1.95) to add the body and some spare bits of speaker wire I had lying around.
First up I glued the wire to the guns and bent the wire into a horseshoe shape. I then wrapped the wire around the underside of the rivet and glued in place. The important thing to remember at this point was that the underside of the rivet had three spilts in it so one needed to be at the rear for the single tripod leg to fit in.
Gluing the washer on top of the wire helped the strengthen the miniature and disguised the wire a bit. Then I turned the body over to attach the eyes..
Applying the glue to the body I stuck two of the LED spacers down and then cut another one up into smaller bits to act as the central eye..
Now I stuck the middile part of the Rivet down to complete the Spiderbots body. A nice and simple build, then it was time to work on the legs. With simplicity in mind I decided not to cut up the legs and to just stick them together as they came.
With all three legs stuck together it was time to attach them to the body. I did have some problems with the legs as I had to work out the angle of the knee joints by hand. Tricky to get them all the same.
Dreadful blurry picture but you get the idea for sticking the legs on the body. Each leg was glued into one of the splits in the underside of the Rivet. I took my time with this to again make sure I had the angles right, otherwise the minature wouldn't stand up once completed.
The final steps were to glue on the knee pads and I then decided to bend the arms/guns back to make them look more threatening, well you know what I mean. And there we have it a very simple design requiring minimal work.
But as I said I wanted an army out of this build. I also built in some variety by doubling up the guns and adding more armour pieces. Currently I have 25 in the build queue. Cost wise I bought enough components to build 50 Spiderbots. This project has a real economy of scale. If I stay at the 25 then each Spiderbot works out at 65p. Making the full 50 will mean 32.5p each (total cost £16.25) You cannot buy a miniature of this size for anything like that.
Here's a scale shot to show the size (in this case the MK2) next to a Void marine (same size as a GW space marine) and an EM4 Robot. All I have to do now is decide on how to paint them! Below is a little video showing more of the completed models.