Scott Copeland’s Tom Servo

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scopeser1

I always loved MST3K, and Tom Servo was my favorite character. I wanted to build one forever, and collected most of the original parts over the years. The elusive part was the “Money Lovers” barrel, they show up for sale occasionally on evilbay occasionally, but usually go for big bucks. I couldn’t see paying $200 for a toy I was going to repaint anyway, so I ordered one from Sledge Riprock. You can get repros of all the Tom & Crow parts on his website, as well as detailed instructions for constructing them both, however, there are several good bot-building sites and I’d recommend looking at more than one. Building a Tom isn’t hard, but there are several steps easy to screw up, and I found pictures showing the steps invaluable! I chose to build the simpler version of Tom without the “Seymour Bunz” bladder to move his arms, the bladder-version was only used early on in the show, and truthfully, the bladder doesn’t move the spring arms much. Otherwise he’s pretty accurate to how the real Tom was built, his mouth opens & closes with a tug on a string and his head can swivel 360 degrees on ball bearings. I didn’t use the original Testers’ “Ruby Red Metal-flake”, which is supposed to be a bear to spray. Instead, I took some advice from some ‘bot builders online and used a rattlecan of Painters Touch “Colonial Red”, which is a dead-on color match without the metal flake. I originally planned on dusting the Colonial Red with some Testor’s Ruby Red Metal-flake as a final coat, as I had seen suggested on some sites, but after a few light coats I decided I liked the Colonial Red just fine as is. The white arm parts & bowl were done with Tamiya “Flat White”, the silver parts are Vallejo Model Air “Metallic Silver”. The inside of his “mouth” was sprayed with Duplicolor Flat Black primer, it’s easy to miss this small step, but your Tom won’t look quite right without it! Really happy with how he turned out, I’m planning on adding some different swappable heads after I find some more Gumball machines!

Scott Copeland