Ever since the cheese loving inventor and his dog were first shown on the BBC in 1989, Wallace and Gromit have been a favourite of children and adults alike. So after numerous watchings we decided to make a model from one of the films.
. . . We loved all the films so much, so it was difficult to choose what to make first. The Wallace and Gromit films are excellent reference for making things, because the sets are all beautifully conceived and are packed with perfectly made models, full of superb, ironic touches.
. . . The strange cooker-robot from Wallace and Gromit's first film 'A Grand Day Out', seemed a good place to start, mainly because it's a basically a box with arms and legs. In the film, Wallace and Gromit decide to go to the moon after they find that they have run out of cheese, their favourite afternoon snack. When they get to the moon (which as everyone knows is made completely of cheese, while laying out their picnic,they meet a very strange (and clearly lonely) cooker-shaped, coin operated robot. It's such a weird and different character, that the kids loved the idea of making one of our own.
. . . To make the box sturdy and solid enough to mount the thin arms on, I filled it with some DIY polyurethane expanding foam filler that I had left over in the shed (you only need a little because it expands so much.
. . . The hardest thing to make look good on any robot, is the hands. For this model I was lucky in that I had kept some packing foam from an electronics product pack and it was quite easy to cut out the shape of the hands from that. However, it would have been just as easy to make the hands from Fimo (a modeling clay that sets hard when heated in the oven) or Polymorph (Shape Lock, US) a low melting point thermoplastic that can be easily molded after heating with hot water.
. . . Get the DVD, watch it I guarantee if you haven't already seen it you don't know what you are missing, and then make a model and have a Grand Day In making the coolest model.