Tom Servo’s been sitting disassembled in my garage for 4 months but I finally started assembling him this weekend, so I could use him for our upcoming fanficisode production. I’ve been putting off working on him because it’s been a disaster of a project, where every little thing that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong, and every time I’ve tried to fix something I’ve only made it worse.
The hoverskirt went together fine, but after fully assembling it, I left it sitting in a box on the other side of the garage with the other white parts. But I guess being in the same room with a dryer created enough of a static charge on the plastic that it managed to suck up every damn microparticle of black primer spraypaint hanging in the air, all the way from the other side of the garage, so as soon as I’d finished primering all the darker pieces, I discovered the entire thing was covered in ugly black smears. (I managed to wipe it down and clean it up using paint thinner, but it still has a few smudges especially around the edges of the train pieces that I couldn’t get rid of completely.
I already owned an original screen-accurate 1990’s snack dispenser head (which are now difficult to find) that I bought decades ago to build a paper maché Tom Servo to take to the MST3K Movie premiere when I was 18, but 18 year-old me used crazy glue to glue the dome together, which of course left it absolutely covered with ugly fingerprints.
I tried to spray a bunch of acrylic lacquer on both the inside and outside of the dome in the hopes of either obscuring the fingerprints or frosting the plastic like the modern Tom puppets, but it only halfway worked, and unfortunately, in the process of doing this Tom took a piece of paper towel to the face which fused itself to his dome, and trying to scrape it off with an xacto blade only served to scratch the hell out of the surface. So now he’s got a massive blemish right in the very front of his face that I can’t remove, and I’m afraid anything else I do to it at this point will just make it worse.
I also ended up with a little bit of silver spill-over around the mouth area, which I figured wasn’t a big deal, as I could just paint over it. But as soon as I started air-brushing on the metallic red, I saw that it showed up quite distinctly as a completely different color. I then put down coat after coat in this area, thinking that it would eventually match up with the rest of the paint job, but after blowing through an entire bottle of Testors, it’s now lumpy and paint-streaked and looks like crap, again, right smack dab in the most visible part of the bot.
Those were my painting problems, but I’ve also run into all sorts of issues with the mouth articulation. I’m not sure if I accidentally broke something 26 years ago when I was originally putting him together, but the lower jaw dislocates and will stick 3/4 of the way closed unless I manually reach up and reseat it, which is not at all helpful if you’re trying to use him as an actual puppet, as I intend to. There’s very little room on the underside of the snack dispenser, but I rigged up an internal spring mechanism that helps pull it back into default position, but this now means that the mouth is extremely noisy to operate, and it still dislocates and jams every so often.
And when my 90° angle bit broke attaching his engine block round about midnight tonight (my fault for using it on a higher powered drill, but it was getting late and my low torque cordless was dead) I decided enough was enough, so he’s now sitting in time-out until I can order a replacement from Amazon and no longer want to smash his stupid gumball face in with a pipe wrench.