Donald, where's your lasers? How we built a robot out of junk

I wasn't joking about Christmas either. This year Santa will be hauling the first wave of real robot toys down chimneys, among them technological wonders such as Cozmo. Manufactured by a company in – where else? – San Francisco, Cozmo went on sale in the UK last Friday and is essentially a £200 robot pet which will recognise its owner and learn their name. Meanwhile Meccano, now owned by Canadian toy company Spin Master, has produced a rival in the form of the uber-cute Meccano M.A.X., which bears more than a passing resemblance to WALL-E.

Then again, why pay all that money for a robot someone else has built when you can create your own unique one – and have fun doing it at the same time? That, in essence, is the thinking behind a new book called Assembled: Transform Everyday Objects Into Robots!

Written by artist and self-confessed junk geek Eszter Karpati in collaboration with a group of like-minded designers, it's a defiantly low-tech riposte to toys such as Cozmo and Meccano M.A.X, to cute-looking industrial robots like Vevo, and to whatever the Danes call their cake icing 'bot. In place of their expensive, high-tech, space age components these robots use everyday objects like forks, spoons, cheese graters, tins, bits of old bike and unloved golf clubs – as well as more esoteric and hard-to-source retro items such as vintage sweetie tins, old Kodak cameras and transistor radios.

One of the leading lights of the homemade robot-building scene is Branimir Misic, who trained as a mechanical engineer and began making sculptures from recycled metal in 2011. "Most of my pieces have humanoid characteristics and are built to evoke amusement," he says. He's not wrong: it's one of his pieces, Cheese Guardian, which is Karpati's cover star. He (or is it she?) is a cute little item made out of a measuring cup, a cheese grater, a wooden-handled salad server, two spoons, two forks and assorted nuts and bolts.

Even more ornate – positively baroque, in fact – is the steampunk-tastic Benny And The Jetpack, made by American artist and illustrator Amy Flynn. She began making robots in her spare time, sourcing material in junk shops and markets around her home in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has given her particular oeuvre the name FOBOTS. It stands for Found Object Robots.

Benny is made from an old electrical tester, the innards of a vintage hairdryer and the blade from a fan. The bird on top of the fan, says Flynn, "is either offering inspiration or else gently mocking Benny's misguided attempt to fly". Another of Flynn's pieces included in the book is Akimbo, in which a robot with an orange pool ball for a face does a one-armed handstand on a black globe while the other hand holds a parasol.

Other robots in the book have names which run from the prosaic – Universal Tool Guy, say, or Mobile Phone Man – to the poetic. One such is Damon Drummond's Even Robots Get The Blues, a robot with immensely long legs and arms, a battered blue battery charger for a body and an old bicycle light for a head. But it's the body language that catches the eye and stirs the emotions: Drummond's 'bot hangs his head disconsolately, while in either hand he holds a wilted flower. Jilted, lovesick or just plain heartbroken? You decide.

All in all, it's a veritable smorgasbord of robots cooked up in every flavour of cute.

And cooked up is the appropriate phrase. “Assembling the robots in this book is not unlike following a recipe so we decided to model the style of the projects loosely on recipes in a cookbook,” Karpati writes in the introduction. “As each of the robot projects is made of found objects, the ingredients relate to each specific bot recipe but you can easily substitute other found objects made of the same or similar materials.”

Now there's a challenge I can't walk away from. So, armed with a handful of kitchen items, one or two “found” objects, a tool box, a smidgen of gaffer tape – is that cheating? – and some odds and ends from the garage, I'm setting out to build myself a robot.

I also have a helper – my daughter Kitty, 9, no previous experience though she did once watch WALL-E on a loop for a year – and a comprehensive understanding of what makes a good 'bot, thanks to an abiding love of all things sci-fi. What else could we possibly need?

We start with the body. It isn't the fun part – that's the weaponry, obviously – but it's where the legs and the head have to be attached so stability is obviously a major concern. Our robot doesn't have to walk or talk or hack into the Death Star mainframe computer like R2D2 in Star Wars, but it does have to be able to stand. So with dependability uppermost in my mind, and assuming that one day all household robots will come flat-packed from a certain globe-straddling Swedish design company, I've turned to IKEA for the body and co-opted the family cutlery draining thingamajig (it's officially called Ordning in the IKEA lexicon, which I'm sure all Sunday Herald readers know is the Swedish for tidiness). It also has handy holes for bolting bits on. Or it would if I could find some bolts.

Still with IKEA, we ransack the cupboard under the stairs for any leftover bits of Billy bookcase and find a worrying quantity of the things you're meant to use to fix them to the wall. No matter. They'll make very good legs. Next up a bit of bling in the form of a bright silver cookie cutter and then, for the head, the piece de resistance – my Soviet-era, medium format camera, a Lubitel 166B made by the Leningradskoye Optiko-Mekhanicheskoye Obyedinenie, or Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association. Better known as Lomo, the company has a cult following in the West thanks to the rather erratic results the cameras tend to give. There's even a word for this style of photography: lomography. Our camera has no film in it, but I like how the top lens appears to light up when you open the viewfinder. It makes the 'bot look almost sentient. Almost.

Next up, the arms, which are also the tools and the weapons. Now, I've seen loads of sci-fi films where robots fly spaceships, fight aliens, translate things into Wookie, turn into cars, rescue people and stomp around shooting rainbow-coloured laser beams out of their mouths – that's a Godzilla Vs MechaGodzilla reference, as I'm sure you're aware – but I've never seen one in which a robot convincingly tackles a large amount of confectionery. So with that in mind, my 'bot is armed with a toffee hammer, which is a hammer for breaking up toffee.

I know, I know, every home should have one. Luckily, mine does. On the other arm is a bit from an old lock, which doesn't do anything significant but it looks good so makes a perfectly acceptable laser cannon. Well if the Daleks can use egg beaters I can get away with the innards of a Yale lock. And I like how it says “This way up” on the side.

Because 'bots have to navigate some difficult terrain, ours has been fitted with a compass. These aren't standard, but we've pushed the boat out and gone for an upgrade. Another enhancement is the bright red, spring-mounted data capture orbs which will help our robot determine whether or not the air in the kitchen is breathable after the cat's dinner has been decanted into its bowl. “Are these from my Deely Boppers?” Kitty asks suspiciously as she fixes them in place. No, like I said, they're bright red, spring-mounted data capture orbs …

Finally we have to name our 'bot. Kitty suggests Donald, which is so bad it's brilliant. We give Donald a hat – actually a dented funnel we use for making chutney – and place it at a suitably rakish tilt. It suddenly gives him a slightly untrustworthy air, but something tells me our toffee-smashing, Soviet optics-celebrating, IKEA-utilising, Deely Bopper-wearing creation isn't unhappy with the look: I'm sure he used one of his two lenses to give us a wink.

Assembled: Transform Everyday Objects Into Robots! by Eszter Karpati is published on September 21 (Jacqui Small Publishing, £20)

EXCLUSIVE EXTRACTS FROM ASSEMBLED: Transform Everyday Objects Into Robots

CHEESE GUARDIAN by Branimir Misic

Since a cheese grater’s purpose is to end the existence of a block of cheese, I imagined this repurposed cheese grater to be, in its second life, the opposite – a protector of cheese. To this end, I gave him a weapon – a trident – to defend the cheese, and named him suitably as Cheese Guardian. His component parts came from the usual antique markets and hardware stores that I visit, and I tried to give him the characteristics of a soldier – stiff and disciplined, standing guard, with weapon ready in hand.

SIZE: 25 x 13 cm (10 x 5 in)

WEIGHT: 0.4 kg (14 oz)

COMPONENTS

1 metal measuring cup

1 cheese grater

2 spoons

2 dinner forks

1 salad-server fork

8 bolts

8 nuts

2 metal buttons

12 tooth-lock washers

1 plain washer

TOOLS

Drill

Screwdriver

Pliers

METHOD

Once you have gathered together your parts and tools, assembly of your Cheese Guardian should take around an hour. First, put together the head by drilling two holes in the measuring cup, about halfway down, and bolting on the metal buttons, affixing with nuts, bolts and tooth-lock washers, to make the eyes.

Next, decide where you would like to position the arms and legs on your guardian’s cheese-grater body. Drill holes accordingly and use as many nuts, bolts and washers as you need to fix the fork arms and spoon legs to the back of the grater.

Bend the spoons into feet and shape one of the forks into position so it can grip a larger salad-server fork as a trident. Bolt the fork hand to the trident and let the end of the trident rest on the floor – this will provide a useful additional point of stability for the piece.

Finally, screw the head to the top front of the body with a final nut and bolt, and your guardian is ready to protect you and your cheese!

ROCKING ROVER by Paul Loughridge

Rocking Rover is my little K-9 buddy who was conceived and designed over the course of a few evenings. I already had the 1973 plaid steel thermos, then decided to make a rocking puppy (as opposed to rocking horse), and raided my collection of unwanted kitchen and leisure items to find the right pieces. His aluminium salt-shaker head is a little heavier than his garlic-press tail, so he had to be internally weighted to achieve the correct stance. Who said you can’t teach a 1973 thermos dog new tricks?

SIZE: 46 x 26.5 cm (18 x 10½ in)

WEIGHT: 1.1 kg (2 lb 7 oz)

COMPONENTS

1 1973 steel thermos

4 bicycle coaster brake arms

1 aluminium (aluminum)salt shaker, large

1 bicycle reflector bracket

2 pocket watch gears

1 auto repair meter knob

1 garlic press

1 kitchen measuring spoon

1 dental impression tray

1 retired wooden tennis racket

34 assorted washers

19 assorted bolts and screws

19 assorted small nuts

TOOLS

Hacksaw

Hand files

Plane

Tin snips

Drill

Ratchet wrench

Socket wrench

METHOD

Start by laying out all of your found pieces in line with your doggy design and cut them to the appropriate shapes as necessary, filing and planing any sharp edges. For Rocking Rover, I trimmed his two rocker treads from an old tennis racket, snipped the handle off an old red salt shaker for his head, sawed a dental impression tray in half for his flappy ears, trimmed a measuring spoon for his tongue, and dismantled a vintage steel thermos to use the shell for his body.

First, securely mount four matching bicycle coaster brake arms to the thermos to make his legs by drilling two holes each side of the thermos and fixing the brake arms with washers, nuts and bolts of suitable sizes. Because the thermos shell is hollow, you are able to hide most of the nuts and washers on the inside, making for a cleaner and less cluttered final piece.

Next, fix the tennis racket rockers to the bottom of the legs with some further drilling and bolting together. To complete the body, take the bowl half of the garlic press and bolt to the bottom end of the thermos to make Rover’s perky tail.

For the puppy’s head, attach the two pocket watch gears for eyes, the two halves of the dental impression tray for characterful flappy ears, the spoon for his tongue and the auto repair meter knob for his shiny black nose, drilling the necessary holes and screwing everything securely in place. Finally, use the bicycle reflector arm as a neck to join the head to the body, and Rocking Rover is fully housebroken and ready to go!

Extracted from ASSEMBLED: Transform Everyday Objects into Robots!  Edited by Eszter Karpati, photography by Brent Darby which is published by Jacqui Small Publishing on 21 September in hardback at £20