February 5 - Chrome Bot

~ The Alan Parsons Project I Robot

I finally got more than sample packs of the chrome balloons and wanted to have a go at what I could make with them.  I've been enjoying the creations people have posted online, but sometimes it feels a bit ... unfulfilling?  Here's a chrome .. duck.  Here's a chrome ... watermelon.   Here's a chrome ... donkey.

The color is fantastic and a thousand times better than any previous metal alternatives, but at the end of the day it's probably more of an access color unless you are building something very specifically metal.  I wanted to build something that gave me some play time but made sense -- so without trying too hard to think of something, here is a robot.

I decided against building any sort of known robot and just played around with the design.  The first build was the small one using the few remaining sample pack balloons I had, but I knew I wanted to build something bigger. 

The legs on the bigger were a first attempt at doing something like Pascal's alien legs, but I wasn't able to get the extreme variation of sizes that he is - and I think part of that might be the chemical makeup of the chrome, the chrome balloons are not as "elastically retractive" as a normal latex balloon.  If you stretch a chrome, it keeps generally stretched and doesn't rubber band back much.