Through the power of 3D printing (and plenty of inventiveness), Russell Munro surprises his son with a "robot in disguise"
by Jason Brick
Every child wants to have a birthday their friends will talk about for weeks. Father and YouTube video maker
Russell Munro, has managed to do exactly that. He made a birthday cake in the shape of Transformer Optimus Prime, one able to transform into a standing robot with a humanoid chassis.
Munro does not go into deep details of how he went about creating the shifting model. What he does reveal allows viewers to know they’re looking at a creation from 3D printing.
There are five major components to these printed pieces: each arm, the chest, the thighs and the lower legs. The thighs and the chest are the only obvious moving parts with the lower legs standing in place to support all of the movement. A pair of arms pops out from the chest once the robot is fully standing.
A video Munro released showed only this inedible 3D printed frame, without the cake added to them. Although this skeleton bears little resemblance to a fully realized Optimus Prime, some camoflauging cake will truly make it a “robot in disguise.”
This is yet another example in how 3D printing is turning the mid twenty-teens into the “decade of makers,” since custom components are easy to both prototype and create. Combined with the powers of crowdsourced funding and a growing and robust online community of makers, we can only expect to see this trend grow in coming years.
Viewers can check out the videos Munro has released on his YouTube
page. There are only two videos, none of them go into detail on how he created this robot for his child or of how long this took him. From what he’s released, it was created through the use of 3D printing and his wife’s skill as a baker.
