Finding Parts for Home-Made 'Bots?

Peter DeWeese asks: "For beginners in the field of anatomical robots, it is quite hard to find resources and shops from which to obtain small parts to build joints. Customized ball joints and a few other types are all that should be needed, and I am sure that others out there have built such machines from their own basements. Does anyone have any good resources on how to build/obtain small unarticulated mechanical joints that would be suitable? Please keep in mind that beginners often don't have metal lathes and high temperature welding torches."

Comments

A Couple Of Starting Places

[Aix]

I would start out looking at Small Parts and McMaster-Carr. These guys have all kinds of stuff. No flame intended, but there are lots of resources out there on the web for this sort of thing. Use Google.

Matter of degree...

[kamandi]

A lot depends on how durable/rigid/strong you need the parts to be. There are a lot of great parts available from Lego Technics and other building kits that mimic organic joints. But they don't have the power to lift or hold much. If you really need strength then you are stuck with higher priced alternatives.

I ended up buying a metal lathe and high temp welding gear after years of frustration trying to find/adapt parts. Metal lathes can be had (for very small parts) for around $150, see the Clisby Lathe. It's easy to spend more than that and you should always count on spending 150% of the price of the machine on tooling for it.

Casting small parts is also feasible for some solutions, check out the small parts casting info at Micro Mark. It's conceivable that you could use Lego parts as the model for parts you cast in metal (zinc and aluminum are easy but there are lower temp alternatives.)

The really cool anatomical robot stuff is being done with Air Muscles which can be home brewed with a little ingenuity.

American Science and Surplus

[stefanlasiewski]

American Science and Surplus sells many small parts that could be used in robots. They have a whole "robot part" section.

They sell surplus equipment of just about every geek persuasion. Beakers to supermagnets to glow in the dark stickers to discounted microscopes from Russia. Periscopes from WWII Sherman Tanks, white coveralls (with a hood and an input for your oxygen tanks), with witty descriptions for every product.

Great for geeks, great for robots, great for halloween.

It's probably one of the funnest geek sites out there, check em out at sciplus.com.

Use the Frankenstein approach

[cybermace5]

Hey, there's a little mad scientist in you already, if you're trying to build a robot. Why not go all the way and find dead equipment, harvesting them for their parts?

Sometimes you get an idea of how something's supposed to be, and no other options seem possible. When you're ripping apart an old copier, or cash register, you'll see a lot of ways to get things done. You can adapt what you need to what you have.

My best sources for parts have been various pieces of office equipment. These are all robots in some way or another, since they fulfill the requirement of a machine doing something that a human would normally do manually. Old scanners and printers are full of gears, motors, toothed belts, pulleys, rollers, shafts, hubs, hinges, etc. Get into a bigger piece of equipment like an old copier, and you'll have a goldmine of parts.

The best part is, you'll have a hard time paying much for the best pieces of equipment. If you want a tiny stepper motor, for example, you'll be looking for a full-height RLL 20MB hard drive. Also, really old 5-1/4" and 8" floppy drives are great sources of small stepper motors, worm drives, etc.

Just keep an eye out for old equipment, make some kind of deal with whatever woman controls your life at this time, and build up a stockpile.