Bartolobot Humanoid Hand

I decided to post this project as inspiration of what can be done with
reused stuff. reclaimed and re-purposed things plus a little imagination, this humanoid arm is almost entirely made of recycled things, starting from the shoulder mounted on a TV dish antenna stand and the shoulder is part of a broken miter saw connected with a pair of piston rods from an old air conditioner pump to the upper arm that's made from an aluminum base ball bat then we have in the fore arm a peddle arm off a bike and sliced down the middle to make the forearm. I made all the Pneumatic cylinders myself from old aluminum tubes. Some came from a diesel truck side handle another on I turned out of an otherwise useless paint ball C02 tank. and all the air lines and fittings are truck brake lines The palm of the hand is an old stove burner. and the fingers were cut from a sun light tube ( solar tunnel ) for homes, that I found smashed.and there are a lot of parts from old printers, VCRs , disk drives and computers in there.

step 1.Gather up you materials and parts

I think to successfully make something complicated like this Humanoid Arm
from recycled materials one must be flexible in design, technical details and final appearance. A good Imagination with careful observation in the materials intended to be reclaimed will help you see the best way to use what you got.

Try to look at all the different
possible ways you can assemble the parts to build as close to what you had in mind, and that the parts will permit. Always keep in mind what you want, what you got, and what you need to make it happen.

Patience and persistence = perseverance

There's nothing like looking at your ideas in 3D form, From any perspective. Even gracefully evolving with every generation a program like Autodesk fusion 360 can put your thoughts in front of your eyes. It offers a variety of tools to help bring your objective to life. I've used the cam tool path generator into g-code for cutting parts out of solid blocks of material on my homemade CNC machine but cnc is not for everyone (Noise, Dust, lots of tooling,and its a deductive process) some advantages over an additive process like 3D printing is the materials. they can be everyday materials like scrap wood, MDF, aluminum, and Plastic.although 3D printing is friendlier your pretty much limited to plastic. unless your a big corporation. Anyway just recently I've been doing some 3D printing of my humanoid hand with Fusion 360 I just push a button in fusion and it sends the G-code to pronterface then I hit print. I have three 3D printers 2 are home made and I bought a brand name one. There is some schooling involved with all of this so do your home work you must.

Check back soon and I will work on Illustrating the construction process with 3D printed parts (hopefully )

In my Humanoid project I use quite alot of reclaimed things but almost all of them had to be modified in some way.

Either by cutting its shape or drilling and or machining I used a lathe on a good number of components here.

for example the two cylinders that twist the wrist (image) I turned the cylinder bodies out of an old semi-truck handle

the shaft rods came out of old printers they were put on the lathe to cut to length and a small grove was made for the "e" clip.. I even used a part out of my BMWs old master cylinder.The metal flex tubing is from bike brake cable. as you can see I modified it also by removing the outer plastic cover cutting them to size and i used a different cable inside It is heavy steel fishing leader.