I found an item that combines two of my favourite things: mid-century wooden furniture and wacky space-age futuristic design. So in this blog post, I’ll be taking a stab at creating the iconic wooden robot bar cart designed by Italian designer Borghesani in 1969. The original bar cart costs a whopping $6,657 and my plan is to DIY it on a budget of course!

DIMENSIONS

NOTE: these are the dimensions i started with but the final product shifted slightly due to the assembly process!

THE PROCESS

I spent about $150 in lumber on this project. I figured my biggest challenge in building this robot would be the scale because I would need to make even the smallest details as realistic as possible. When it was time to build, I started with the bigger easier pieces before working on the smaller more detailed pieces.

Around the top and bottom of the main compartment, there’s a fancy fluted wood trim that I tried to recreate with a bunch of little wooden dowels that I cut to size. Because I had to cut a bunch of dowels and needed them all to be the same length, I bundled them up in some tape and cut them all at once using my circular saw.

One of the trickier details to figure out were the hands. I tried to buy some already made but the ones I found weren’t the right scale so I put my sculptor hat on and recreated some little robot hands out of modelling clay.