Ch, 4 In Which Mikeasaurus comes to Instructables and I Build Portal Stuff

Hey Instructabrarians!

SHIFT! here to give you all of the semi-recent goings on at Instructables Laboratories!  Last week, our facility opened it's doors to our newest team member Mikeasaurus!  He's been a long time user and fan of the site (you might remember him from such classic 'ibles like Wristwatch Turntables, the very Blade Runner-esque Umbrella Light, and most recently the popular Magnetic Putty ) and we are pleased to have him join us.  So far, he's done a terrific job helping me out with shipping out packages as well as being a fantastic go to guy for any Photoshop editing needs! 

As for me, awhile ago for one of our in-house contests, I was looking for unique ways to liven up our lab at Instructables HQ. My inspiration finally from a picture of the iconic cake, from the first Portal game, that hangs – on our bathroom door. I thought it would be really fun to create some kind of companion piece alongside it, and decided to make a couple of themed papercraft models based on the game. 

For my first craft I decided to make something that would help protect Instructables’ top secret information from unwanted intruders and rogue test subjects. “Hey”, I thought, “why not the militaristic Turret defenses?” This deadly craft was designed by deviantart’s billybob884 using Pepakura software. He has done some amazing work with papercrafts and Portal and was responsible for designing my amazing GLaDOS papercraft I enlarged 24 X for our recent Game.Life Contest. (“Oh, So NOW you’re _go^ing to mention Me? [[=REDACTED=]], you Monster.”)

Next, I constructed a tiny 1- inch craft, the fan favorite friendly Companion Cube, desktop edition for our editor-in-chief zazenergy. This craft was designed by user Moony for the /po/ board on 4chan.com Just the thing to help zazenergy with some normal day to day testing!

 Finally I created the FrankenTurret that was featured in Portal 2 which (spoiler alert) is a horrific combination of the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube. This cool miniature craft, however, came from digitprop.com and was given to Mikeasaurus, who is another fellow Portal fan of our lab. I also have future plans for a fully functioning one and plan to submit it to our Simplebots curator and designer Randofo sometime soon.

Anyway, I love Portal and Papercrafts so this seemed like a perfect combination to me. I have a few more Full-Scale versions for some of our upcoming contests, so that should be really interesting.

-SHIFT!


EDIT: I had pictures of Mike in our office, but can't seem to find them anywhere, sadly.