Scrap-metal maestro Mad Mike’s robot creations rise from the rubbish heap By: David Sanderson Posted: 1:43 PM CDT Thursday, Mar. 28, 2024

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This article was published 28/03/2024 (880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WEST ST. PAUL — Know the idiom “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”?

That definitely rings true with Michael Beaudry, a West St. Paul resident who creates whimsical, robot-like sculptures out of scrap metal and detritus he turns up here, there and everywhere.

For instance, he’ll spot a rusty bicycle chain resting on the side of the road and reimagine it as arms or legs. Or he’ll luck into an old transistor radio, soldered oil can or pair of pocket binoculars at a garage sale, knowing each would be suitable as a head, says the founder of Mad Mike Studio68, seated in his dining room next to his wife and business partner Jacquie.

“To be able to take something that was considered worthless or dispensable by one person and turn it into a piece of art somebody else will get a kick out of is so self-satisfying, I can’t even begin to describe the feeling,” he says, introducing us to one of his latest contrivances, an 18-inch-tall unit dubbed Peanut for the vintage Planter’s cocktail peanuts tin that serves as its torso.

Beaudry, 56, likes to believe he comes by his repurposing ways honestly. He was born in Los Angeles where his father, an electrician, was employed in the film industry. It wasn’t uncommon for his dad to return home from a long day on the set with a few props under his arm, ones otherwise destined for the rubbish heap.

“My father was the sort who didn’t like to see things getting thrown away if they still had a practical purpose, even if it was just to decorate our house for Halloween,” he says.

Beaudry’s family moved to Winnipeg, where his parents were from originally, in 1972. By the time he was attending Elmwood High School, Beaudry was mimicking his father’s salvaging bent, by taking regular detours down neighbourhood back lanes on his way to and from class, in search of whatever dross people were parting with.

“I’d come across an old rotary phone and even if the dial was busted, I’d throw it in my backpack, figuring I’d find a use for it, one day.”

The father of two became an industrial mechanic after finishing high school. He was also a volunteer member of the West St. Paul fire department, in addition to assisting Jacquie with their antique business, Bumblebee Junktion. Things were going along swimmingly until 2017, when he was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

His physician recommended he take a leave from his job, including his firefighting responsibilities. In the interim, he suggested Beaudry set aside some much-needed time for himself.

“Before getting sick, I always felt like I had to be on the go, 24 hours a day, whether it was putting in overtime at work, or arriving home and looking around for something that needed renovating or fixing… I could never just sit still,” he says, describing himself back then as the proverbial hamster-on-a-wheel. “When my doctor told me I needed to slow down or else, it was like this enormous weight was lifted off my shoulders.”

Beaudry had always maintained a heated, backyard workshop. He began heading in there for a few hours every afternoon, to tinker about. A science-fiction movie nut, he challenged himself one day to build a robot character, one reminiscent of Robby the Robot from the 1956 flick Forbidden Planet, out of bits and bobs strewn about his shelves. (Because of their antique-and-vintage biz, he already had a full supply of vintage metal tins and assorted machinery parts at his disposal, Jacquie points out.)

Beginning with a red-and-yellow Keen’s mustard powder tin as the main body, he added an automobile piston as noggin, a pair of wrenches for arms and swivel caster wheels for feet.

On a whim, he brought the welded-together unit to the Old House Revival Company on Young Street, where Jacquie rented a booth for their antiques. Imagine his surprise when a young couple stopped in their tracks, not just to ask “how much?” but also, did it have any cousins? Give him a couple of weeks, came his response.

Beaudry knows what you’re going to say: if, according to doctor’s orders, he was supposed to be a person of leisure, wouldn’t taking on an entirely new project set him back, health-wise? The thing was, he didn’t feel any pressure, whatsoever, to produce what he took to calling eco-art or assemblage art. Rather, he found it therapeutic to use his imagination and mechanical skill set, to breathe new life into what were essentially piles of flotsam and jetsam.

“No word of a lie, these little guys helped me to heal,” says Beaudry, who now works as a health-and-safety coordinator. “What I quickly realized was that it was good for my mental health to do something for no reason other than to have fun and amuse myself, whether I sold any or not.”

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Having moved over to his ultra-cluttered workshop, Beaudry reaches for his most recent project, to demonstrate his procedure. He almost always commences with the robot’s trunk, he says. In this case, he has settled on an altitude gauge from a Cessna aircraft for that particular purpose. (He almost went with a five-inch, portable black-and-white TV set but hey, there’s always next time, he laughs.)

He’s convinced a Polaroid camera dating back to the 1960s is going to be the head, but he’s still debating between spark plugs or electrical cables for the extremities. “I always say it’s impossible to make a mistake, because there are no rules with these things, but at the same time, once I start welding, I’m pretty much committed,” he states.

Unlike similarly talented North American artisans who operate under banners such as Rust Bot Recycled Metal Art, the Funky Robot and Woahbotz, Beaudry prefers to keep his output as minimalist as possible. That means he won’t touch up the paint on a Black Flag insect spray tin or Coca-Cola salt shaker that has seen better days — nicks and dents only add character, he feels — nor will he “bling up” his bots by adorning them with flashing lights and whatnot.

“It’s not like it’d be hard to add a battery pack and wire up something like this,” he says, holding out a headlight from what he guesses was a forklift. “It’s just that I prefer to keep things simple, and not overwhelm people with a bunch of moving parts. To me, it’s better if the construction speaks for itself.”

Beaudry’s robots, as well as high-quality prints he and Jacquie have had made of some of his more popular designs, are available for purchase at a number of spots, including Seven Café on Wall Street and Lagasse’s Studio of Fine Arts in Souris. His most famous customer to date? That would be Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who played one of the title characters in the CBC television series Kim’s Convenience.

He and Jacquie operated a booth at ComicCon last October where Lee was one of the special guest stars, Beaudry says, scrolling through his phone to find a pic of the two of them standing next to Lee, who also appeared in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. The four-time Canadian Screen Award-winner told them he was renovating his rec room and, while eyeing their merch, announced excitedly he would “take this one and this one and that one.”

Beaudry, who has shipped robots and prints across Canada and as far as San Francisco, agrees sales are a feather in his cap, but the transaction he treasures most had zilch to do with dollars and cents.

For a few years, he and Jacquie have been producing wildly entertaining TikTok videos of him in the “lab,” where he adopts the persona of a mad scientist who uses smoke and mirrors to craft his bots. A few of those videos have clocked as many as 500,000 views, and last fall, a person who follows Beaudry’s online antics made a special trip to a pop-up sale, where Mad Mike Studio68 was a featured vendor.

“I have touched on my struggles with mental health in some of my videos, and this one fellow approached me to say he’d been in bad spots, too, and how watching my crazy antics picked him up and helped get him past what he was dealing with,” Beaudry says, taking a deep breath.

“I shook his hand and said, ‘Sir, I don’t care if I sell another robot, the rest of the year,’ and how his taking the time to drop by and say hi was worth more than any amount of money I could ever hope to receive.”

For more information, go to mad-mike-studio68.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca