|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Diogenes |
These little critters are called-- as you may have guessed-- Zords. I started making them a few years back when I was a maintenance engineer at National Public Radio. There would come an hour in the afternoon when I just couldn't face soldering one more damn mic cable, and all the fascinating audio junk lying around would cease lying and start jumping up and down and begging to be made into something. This, by the way, is Diogenes. My father named him that in honor of the lamp he carries as he wanders around the living room, looking for an honest man. |
|
The guys in the maintenance shop started calling them Petrazords, and I guess the rest is history. They're made from bits of old audio equipment, for the most part. Relays, for instance, make great robot torsos, pinch rollers serve for wheels, facial features can be cobbled together from capacitors and resistors, and old indicator lights can be used for just about anything. A lot of pieces are odd enough that they suggest something to me-- like the switch that forms the head of Punk Dog over here. It was originally the volume knob on a Scully reel-to-reel deck. But really, it was crying out to be a robot dog mohawk. |
 |
|
And this is Tron. He normally lives by the kitchen telephone, and is often called upon to hold pens and pencils so I can take messages. I think he eats them, though, when no one's looking.
 |
Ah, good old T-Rex. One of my favorites, although I think the other zords are a little scared of him. He's made of lovely big blocky relays, with a pinch roller for a neck and assorted capacitors making up arms and tail. I put him together with bus wire, solder and shrink tubing, with liberal lashings of hot glue.
Tron
Finally, we have Dizzy Bird, so named because he has a hard time standing up-- though that may be more my fault than his. Dizzy's head started life as a record head on an Otari reel-to-reel deck, but I think it looks much better as a bird head with multicolored wire plumes. I'm still making zords and selling them to good homes. All the ones on this page can be reproduced pretty exactly (except for Punk Dog), and I'm also happy to build custom zords. Drop me a line!
|
