A good friend of mine, Matt, is an excellent chef. He’s always refining his cooking skills with more and more culinary studies. He has commissioned me to create a chef robot, which we aptly named ChefBot.

Chef by scragz

One of Matt’s requests was for ChefBot to break the cliche chef statue attributes: short fat guy with a mustache holding a plate of spaghetti. I knew right off that this robot’s main parts would need to be something found in a kitchen. It only makes sense, right? So in keeping with Matt’s request and my gut feeling, I went in search of a kitchen item that would fit the bill. A drink mixer!

Wonky

On a warm, sunny weekend I went to a flea market that was having a swap meet in the front parking lot. I found some cool, wonky wrenches, but no mixer outside. After getting the wrenches I headed inside knowing I’d find the main part of the new robot. Sure enough, past the musty smelling Barbie doll graveyard and around the corner from the lacquered slabs of wood depicting loverly scenes of cabins and barns with clocks where waterwheels would be, I found it! There he was, the unsuspecting future ChefBot. It was meant to be.

I picked up some other treasures in the flea market as well… some kitchen utensils, skewers, and a tackle/organizer box with miscellaneous washers and metal bits. I passed on the decaying Barbies. I’m sure it’s safer for everyone if they stay taped in their individual sandwich baggies. With my new found robot parts I was able to get started. I needed arms though.

New idea for robot arms… by Scottoons

I have a vision of ChefBot with several long, serpentine, metal arms flailing all about with surgical precision dissecting meats and vegetables, prepping a whole meal in a matter of minutes. The FUTURE of COOKING!

So, yeah… arms. My original thought was the bendy parts of gooseneck desk lamps. I found a few lamps at a thrift store. I quickly found out it was going to be tough to get just the bendy portions apart, much less find several more with the same lengths. I remembered a whole different material I saw on a post from a tool blog, Toolmonger (great site, by the way). It was a modular hose which came in separate Lego-like pieces that you could use to shoot air at your drill press or other piece of machinery to blow the waste debris away from your work. I did some searching and found Loc-Line pieces which work great for the arms!

ChefBot: clay knife hand by Scottoons

I sculpted a chef’s knife out of a two-part compound clay called Magic-Sculpt. Great stuff! You mix equal parts resin and hardener and work it like modeling clay. Then you simply let it dry over night and it cures extremely strong. You can then carve and sand it and paint it. Like I said, great stuff!

I’ve added two more arms, making him an octo-bot (maybe he can get on Oprah). I carved on a wooden spoon for one hand, chef knife for another, whisk becomes a third hand, and a hand mixer beater for a fourth. I cut down one of the skewers so he has an opposing fork hand to compliment the knife. Hm, haven’t quite decided what the sixth hand will be yet. I am designing the remaining two robot hands to have finger-like pincers. I’ve been experimenting with riveting copper tubing together to create two fingers and a thumb that hinge. ChefBot needs to be able to crack eggs and add spices… how can you have a pinch of salt if you have no extremities to pinch with?!

While the robot-manufacturing is going on, I’ve been dreaming up his outfit. It’s not easy coming up with a pattern for a chef’s jacket to go on an eight-armed robot! We’ll just have to see how that comes out. As I continue working on him, I’ll continue to document the creation of ChefBot.
(now continued on The completion of ChefBot)