Well, here goes. Crow is the hardest to build the hardest to find parts for, and arguably the most expensive of all the 'bots. But it's all worth it when you see a close friend look upon your creation in wonder and say,

"Hey, you used a cheap bowling pin." 

This is probably an indication you need new friends.

Let's start with:

You will need:

1. Complete floralier plus an extra tray.
2. About 3 or 4 feet of 3/4" PVC pipe (the thin kind, NOT schedule 40)
3. A 3/4" PVC connector
4. About 8 inches of Gypsy tubing
5. Replica shoulders, actual lamp units (good luck), or wooden blocks (3.5" wide by 3" long by 1.25" thick, "bullnosed")
6. Replica Arms (scratch built, or modified swing arm lamps)
7. About 3" of "poppet" tubing
8. Primer
9. Semi flat black paint
10. Generic gold paint and Testor's Lime Gold Metal Flake paint.
11. A 3/4" drill bit and a couple of smaller ones for shoulder screws.

Start by drilling a 3/4 hole through all of the pieces. Make sure they all line up. If you use a drill bit that is slightly too small and sand it out later then there will be enough friction to hold the floralier on your 3/4" PVC pipe and you will not have to worry about using screws. Mount all of these pieces on the PVC pipe, placing your Gypsy tubing in between the two floralier trays. Now place your shoulders in between the trays on the outer ends (where the shoulders go, duh!) Mark where you will drill the holes. Usually you will have to take the trays back off to do this. Once everything is in place, get your paint ready. Test assemble everything first. Floralier plastic is awful to paint, because like the bowling pin mouth, the paint does not stick to it exceptionally well. Here's what I did:

1. Several coats of primer, sand between coats.
2. Semi flat black on the insides of all the pieces, and the floralier gratings (cut the middle out of the little one so your pipe passes through). The shoulders and Gypsy tubing (4" diameter) are also semi flat black.
3. Generic gold on all of the exterior surfaces (several coats, for a uniform finish. This prevents a finish that is uneven if you simply used Lime Gold flake. It's a WHOLE lot cheaper too.)
4. A couple of light (!) coats of Testors Lime Gold Flake. This stuff looks great, but it runs like nothing you would believe. Stop painting at regular intervals to clear the nozzle out so your paint doesn't become "Orange Peel"-ish

Now simply reassemble, using the screws for the shoulders. If you used wood blocks for your shoulders, add a 90 degree piece to the bottom of them, to attach the arms to. (See pic above. I used half of a drawer handle made out of black plastic, with holes drilled for the arm and shoulder connector screws.) Add a section of "poppet" tubing to the joint (painted black) and attach the arms so they swing fairly freely. Cut the 3/4" pipe to the desired length (mine was about 4" below the final floralier piece), prime it and paint it black. Ditto on the PVC connector, which goes on top of the PVC that sticks out of the top floralier tray. Push this down until the bottom of the connector is flush. Beautiful. Now put it in a safe place and start on the head.

You will need:

1. An empire toys, co. plastic bowling pin, preferrably the older version with the "E" logo instead of the "Crown" logo.
2. A Vacuform copy of a Schwartz Bros soap dish (www.joecrow.com has these, and all sorts of parts cheap)
3. A Cooper XL7 face mask (hard to find, but you may substitute other Cooper masks, adding a "shroud" of styrene plastic)
4. A 1/2" PVC connector
5. Scrap styrene to build the back of the soap dish
6. A small, loose spring or some black elastic
7. The smallest hinge you can find
8. Pop rivets that fit into the holes on your hinge.

(I'll get to the eyes later, when I do the leftover bits and mechanisms)

Start by cutting the bowling pin in half. Every single bot building site there is will tell you exactly how to do this, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is one of a cut pin:

Basically, you cut out similar "mouth" shapes from either end of the pin, and keep the front end as his mouth. Next drill a 3/4" hole through the center of the pin (between the two rings on the thin portion) so the bottom "jaw" is level. This pin gets mounted on a 1/2" PVC connector. Not many types of glue stick to the pin; I recommend using some wire threaded through holes in the pin and connector to hold it more firmly in place as well as the glue (epoxy or JB Weld). Next, drill another 3/4" hole in the bottom of your soapdish (as far back as possible!), and either glue or snap the dish onto the top of the PVC connector. Trace the back of the dish and create a backing plate for it from styrene plastic. Do not glue this on! I used a wooden back, and glued it on prematurely, so when I got around to doing the eye mechanism, there was no room to fit the darn thing in! Well, once you have the "eye surround" assembly ready, take your face mask and attach it to the back of the pin, with either bolts or more wire. I used wire, and attached it to the soap dish as well because I used a newer "Crown" pin, which is flimsier than the older "E" pins. You now have a basic head shape.

To make the mouth move, I used a small brass hinge attached to the two jaw parts with rivets. Clean up the edges of your cut pin first, before attaching the hinge. To keep the mouth shut, I attached a very "loose" spring to top and bottom (it was about 1/2" shorter than the width of the pin) and used fishing line tied onto small washers to hold it on. The bottom hole for your spring string can be used with a very small washer to attach a puppeteering string (see pic below). More on the pupeteering later. Prime and paint the head. The inside of the mouth, the inside of the soap dish, and the smaller "mouth" shape on the back of the pin are all painted black. Paint the black area first, and then use newspaper and masking tape to make sure none of the gold gets in.

(this is the tricky part)

You will need:

1. A length on 1/2" PVC pipe that fits into your "torso" PVC pipe, about 3 feet longer than the torso piece.
2. 1/2" PVC connector
3. Some scuba tubing (or another length of "poppet tubing")
4. Fishing line
5. K'nex pieces, a rubber band, ping pong balls, film cannister cores and a 1/4" dowel for the eye mechanism.
6. Safety yellow paint for the eyes
7. Electrical tape squares for pupils

Start by cutting the 1/2" PVC "neck" to the desired length and deciding where you want the "poppet" to go on the neck, and how long the neck will be. Rest the neck on the torso by cutting out the center of the PVC connector and sliding the two ends down onto the neck so they will rest on the PVc connector which is on top of the torso. Glue the "poppet" or scuba tubing onto this and drill a small hole in the front of it to accommodate your puppeteering string. Look at the head shot above to see how this goes together. Prime and paint this black, and attach the head. Paint the bottom end (the part that sticks out) of the PVC black also. I bet you'd like to run a string down this and test it, wouldn't you? Well, too bad, because you need to have something at the bottom to connect the string to. But first, keep the neck from sliding up by attaching a small 3/4" PVC ring to the neck PVC at the bottom of the torso with a small screw, so you can't slide the neck up.

A couple of inches from the bottom of your 1/2" neck piece, slide up a 2" piece of the 3/4" torso PVC and attach one of your small hinges to this. To the other end of the hinge, attach a 3 or 4" wood or metal bar, with something on the end to attach the puppeteering string to. With luck, the screws you used for the hinge will fasten the two pipes together so you will have a lever you can spin to turn the head, and which you can move up and down. Now, drill a 1/2" hole about 3" above where your lever is and thread apiece of fishing line down the neck, and tie it off at the end of your lever. Tie the other end to the bottom of your bowling pin, so the lever is tight at about a 45 degree angle to the PVC neck. When you push down on the lever, the mouth should open! The lever system means you can operate Crow's head and mouth with one hand, leaving the other hand free for the eyes. (See the picture below for where the lever is placed- this was taken before everything was painted so the lever is wood colored. I ended up painting the neck and torso rods black, and the lever with PVC sleeve and lever gold

Now that you can work the mouth, you need to add something to the bottom to make the eyes as animated. This is probably the hardest piece to build. To start with, you need a mechanism that fits inside the soap dish. Good thing you didn't glue on the back of the dish so now you have more access, eh? Here is a diagram of what I used:

Basically, you cut the excess pieces off a white K'nex wheel-shaped spidery connector, and mount it on a section of a shaft attached to two orange "H" pieces, and you have it. A rubber band is attached to the bottom of the wheel and the "Hs" so the eyes will always pop back up level. The two "Hs" are glued to half of a film canister core (this was what I could find that fit on a 1/4" dowel and was about the right size). Drill two small holes (one in front, one in back) on the "disc" part of the core and thread your two eye strings through this. Instead of mounting the eyes directly on the K'nex wheel, I mounted them on a K'nex bar instead that can snap off the wheel, making replacing the eyes extremely simple. It's getting the ping pong balls stright on the shaft that is the hard part. As well as gluing the shaft ("blue" length) into the balls, you need to "squash" them so a sizeable dent is in them where the shaft goes so when the eyes move up and down they have sufficient clearance over the "Hs" and the rest of the assembly. There is a lot of experimentation involved in getting this to work right but in the end it's worth it. When your eye mechanism is done, mount it on the 1/4" dowel and thread the two strings down the neck, attaching them to small rings or beads so you can pull on them and the eyes will either look up or down. I attached the bottom of the dowel to another film canister as a handle, and threaded the two strings through similar holes so that entire assembly is one-handed to operate. Now play with all of these mechanisms until they break and you have to rebuild them again.

So there you have it. A complete Crowtus Roboticus Junkus (this is the Latin name), in a few pages of ranting. Crow is definitely worth taking time on, so everything looks nice and finished. With luck, your Crow will last for years, giving pleasure to yourself and others as you fight for free speech in movie theaters. At least, he will last until you decide to replace some or all of your recast parts or he needs another paint job, then he will be back in the shop again.