Wall-E Wood

Expert woodworker Peter Vivian has been a maker for as long as he can remember. Building upon early success in a model-making competition at school, Vivian trained as a technical illustrator and spent the next two and a half decades in graphic design and commercial photography. Yet throughout that time, he yearned to have his own woodworking business, which he eventually launched and ran for 10 years before transitioning to teaching, helping students master the myriad skills he had attained across his career in the form of a university product design course.

Among his hundreds of projects, Vivian counts cartoons that have been presented to King Charles, pieces displayed at the Royal Albert Hall, and regular features in Woodworker magazine and associated exhibitions. He has even built his own ash-framed, aluminum-clad car, using tools be built himself, in a workshop that, perhaps unsurprisingly, he also built himself!

The Wall-E project was a request from a friend, after seeing a Doctor Who Dalek model and radio-controlled K-9 that Vivian and a colleague made at the university. Despite having access to all manner of tools at home and work, Vivian ended up fabricating 80% of the Wall-E project with a cheap razor saw and a homemade mitre box. Blueprints for a Lego version helped inform proportions, with details garnered from movie stills. The body is a simple plywood box, connected to the head via an articulated, extendable neck, which enables posing. The eyes are formed from polyurethane foam and wrapped in thin strips of black walnut with lathe-turned irises and pupils. The arms, with their accurate inlaid chevrons, pivot as well, with rotating hands and fingers that really grip.

Photography by Peter Vivian

Vivian saved the tracks until the end, expecting them to be the most difficult aspect of the project, but they ended up coming together fairly easily. The rollers were turned on the lathe, with tracks formed from strips of black walnut glued to flexible ply and wrapped around the rollers. A colleague laser-engraved the front panel with the Wall-E font, and all that was left were a few coats of Danish oil to literally finish the project.

Upon seeing Wall-E, another friend suggested that the Iron Giant might make a similarly charming candidate for the obsoletely fabulous treatment, but that’s another story for another issue!

This article appeared in Make: Vol. 90. Subscribe for more maker projects and articles!