Josef Adamčík

Scratchbuilding beatbots

Jul 27, 2021
2 minute read

A scratch-building story full of beads, bots, super-glue and baking soda.

Beadbots

Thanks to my recent obsession with model making and painting, I have watched a ton of YouTube videos showing various techniques involved in model making. Apart from the instructional videos, I watched mainly to learn I have also seen a lot of others that caught my attention in some way. One of the channels was Bill Making Stuff.

Bill makes a lot of cool stuff from garbage, cheap plastic toys and beads. His signature paint is rusty, his humour fits my taste and all of that is topped by a bit of clever safety advice (which is very important, there are kids and inexperienced people on YouTube). Seriously, go and watch Bill making stuff.

I chose to support Bill’s channel on Patreon because it does stand out and I do try to support the channels I like the most and watch periodically. One of the rewards is access to his Discord channel’s Patreon area and part of that are Patreon challenges. Bill asks his Patreons to build something in given constraints and make a short clip of the result. He takes part in the challenge as well, makes a video about his build and includes Patreon builds in the video.

The first challenge was deo-stick challenge and you can watch it here. The second challenge, which started at the time I joined the Discord, was a bead-bot challenge: make a bot from beads (mainly) and scrap in 28 mm1 scale.

As I watched people on discord sharing their progress I wasn’t able to resist. I easily convinced my partner and we decided to join the challenge and treat it as a weekend couple activity. We had a blast and are very happy with the results!

A load of beads from a local store.
A load of beads from a local store.
Building my first bead-bot.
Building my first bead-bot.
Body of the second one.
Body of the second one.
Finished and waiting for paint.
Finished and waiting for paint.
Primed and ready.
Primed and ready.
Painting in progress.
Painting in progress.
With some chipping (using the sponge technique, this was actually the first time I tried it).
With some chipping (using the sponge technique, this was actually the first time I tried it).
Some rust and staining using oil paints and clear coat. This is the final state.
Some rust and staining using oil paints and clear coat. This is the final state.
Together with the two my partner built.
Together with the two my partner built.

I must admit we did struggle to keep the bots in scale. The smallest one is 30 mm and therefore already high as a human. Thankfully we can always say, that the robots are giant when compared to humans.

My partner developed a bit of an addiction (a beaddiction!) and kept building bots and animals from beads for several weeks. She made a lot of awesome stuff and you should certainly check it out on her Instagram @sophiehardy5. By the way, I have an Instagram account too and I plan to share my builds there as well.

Here is Bill’s video for the challenge featuring our 9 seconds long contribution.

Footnotes

  1. 28 mm scale is from table top miniature wargaming. Usually it’s describe as this: a human male figure has 28 mm from feet to eyes. ↩

Looking for comments? There are no comments on this website, at least for the time being. But If you feel you would like to say something, send me (josef.adamcik@gmail.com) an e‑mail, please. I might even publish a resulting conversation as an update to the post, if it's worth it.