One of the original visions for this year’s Star Wars Halloween House was to have a giant Jawa Sandcrawler with lots of droids in front of it.  After the layout shifted to the streets of downtown Mos Eisley, I still wanted to make sure that Tatooine’s abundant droid population was represented.  But how?

About that time, I ran across Gonzolo Rojo Aguirre’s tutorial for how to make a Gonk Droid out of parts from IKEA.  That corresponded to our thrifty approach and our limited timeframe, so we made a trip to IKEA and picked up some parts.  I added in some drainage pipe, some wood and half of a take-out tray, and had all the parts I needed to bring a droid to life.

But why should I have all the fun?  We host a Kid’s Day in our neighborhood and around Halloween we have the event at our house to teach project construction skills.  Could kids build a robot?  Absolutely!

So, we showed them the plan.

And they set to work, joining parts together by tightening bolts and nuts.

They added some ‘coverings.’  (C3P0 made sure we did that).

And, voilà!  A Gonk Droid (or Power Droid if you are an action figure collector).

The crew also made a five foot Millenium Falcon by piecing together sticker-backed puzzle pieces that we printed out on our printer.

In no time they were done!

So, when Halloween comes around these kids can come by and point to the fruit of their labors—a droid any Jawa would be proud to sell and the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.  Nice work!