Not all of us have the engineering skills to make our own robots. But as this very cool how-to video shows, with just a little imagination and some common household materials, anyone can make a mechanical friend entirely out of cardboard.
This ingenuous creation, which we learned about at Laughing Squid, comes from the YouTube channel SKM. Using nothing more than paper, an X-Acto knife, cardboard, glue, and scissors, this offers a guide on how to cut and construct the right pieces needed to make working gears and a skeleton hand whose fingers you can then movie with a small handle.
(Remind me how much we’re all about to pay Nintendo for their prepackaged Labo cardboard Switch sets?)
What’s especially cool about this is how easily it could be transformed into an amazing Halloween decoration. If you attached a small motor to the handle and painted this, you would have a “real” robotic hand you wouldn’t have to spend big bucks on.
And this is just the latest cardboard creation from this channel, and surprisingly probably one of the “simpler” ones. For example, this working cardboard wishing well does utilize a motor:
Maybe we don’t all have engineering degrees, but we’re probably all capable of being more creative with cardboard than using empty wrapping paper tubes as lightsabers. Now we can whip up Luke’s mechanical hand for a complete set!
What other working cardboard creation would you like to learn how to make next? Get your gears in motion and tell us in the comments section below.
Featured Image: SKM
More fun with science and technology!
- Adam Savage is starting a MythBusters for kids!
- The solution to dangerous space junk: a giant harpoon
- A hydraulic press made a frying pan out of aluminum foil
