The Cassette Bot By Bryan Jackson
How do you
make a robot
out of a VHS
cassette tape?
What is a VHS
cassette tape?
Is this guy cheap
or what? These
questions and
many more will
be answered in
this article about
making a cheap
VHS cassette
robot.
It all started with a bang. My wife and kids had been to Grandma’s house, and after a good day of terrorizing the grandparents, had brought home some borrowed
video tapes. (Those are the things your parents used before
DVDs were invented.) Immediately upon entering the
house, my darling children accidentally dropped several of
the video cassettes on the floor resulting in one VHS
cassette suffering damage from a broken dust flap.
Immediately after the obligatory lecture about being careful
with other people's stuff, several pairs of expectant eyes
turned toward me.
"Can you fix it?" my wife asked.
"If you have a cassette you don't care about I can pull
parts from it," I replied.
So, I took the sacrificial tape apart and salvaged the
aforementioned dust flap. I then expertly replaced the
broken part on the offending tape and put everything back
together again. Of course, it didn't play so I took it apart
again and put everything in the right place this time, and
got the thing working (thus remaining in the in-law's will
and on their good side for at least the next week).
So, what do I do with the rest of the parts? Why make
a robot, of course. It was so obvious looking at the parts
strewn across the table. The small imp in charge of VHS
48 SERVO 02.2010
