I have been wanting to make this custom for YEARS, but the Sawed off Runt contest was the thing that got me to finally bite the bullet and actually MAKE him. Atomic Robo is one of my favorite comic books, and one of my favorite characters too, part Iron Giant, part Rocketeer, part Indiana Jones, with that perfect cynical sense of humor that can only be born out of a century of life as action scientist. I always loved how despite being a 300 pound living tank Robo is only about 5 feet tall, often a full head shorter than just about any other character on the page.

Now, as for the figure itself. It would probably have been easier to make him out of an Iron Man Mk1 or something, but that would have been too obvious, and besides I wanted Robo's shortness to be reflected in the figure scale (a 5 inch Robo standing next to 6 inch figures would scale quite nicely.) So I decided instead to use a Baymax figure, with its huge barrelled chest and massive arms it seemed to be the best base for what I had in mind. Of course Baymax has proportionately short arms and legs so I had to do pretty significant modding. For the arms I simply cut off the hands, added some apoxie sculpt to the forearm to make it longer, and then stuck the hands back on the ends (the wrist articulation still works.) But the legs were more of a challenge, they're made from Bionicle parts sculpted over to look like his pants and shoes (this is more or less based on how he looks on the cover of the first trade) but I had to carve out quite a bit around Baymax's hips in order to make room for the setup, though it fit amazingly well given how the buck is assembled...after the contest ends I'll post a video showing how I made it and you'll see what I did. Baymax's head IS still on there, but I pretty much completely sculpted over it, it was really tiny and I only needed it as the hole for the neck peg.