Monthly Archives: February 2012

R2 is now wearing a skirt and has a detachable center foot mount!

Felt a little better today. The cold is definitely on its way back, and I’ve taken things easy again.

However, there are a few things that I’ve done on the droid after all.

First off, I drilled and tapped the center ankle and also the skirt and frame bottom, to allow for the center foot to be mounted on and off with 6mm wing nuts, just like the center legs.

So, now my leg mounts are complete! I also drilled and fastened the center foot into the ankle with 6mm bolts, so everything is secure!

Next thing was to sand the edges of the skirt, to get ready for completing it. I also wanted to add inner walls to the skirt, even though it is on the underside of R2, and very few people will ever see anything there, but I like to keep things looking neat, so I glued in 1mm styrene to cover the structure of the skirt.

Once that was done, I sat in my chair for a while chamfering. *sigh* Not my favorite thing to do, but necessary. And messy.

(… and I had cleaned up twice before I took that picture…)

Finally, the skirt, side angles and cones was glued onto the bottom ring, and is left over night to dry off. Only thing remaining now is the “ribs”, something that will require a lot of chamfering… again.

By |2016-12-06T00:01:48+01:00February 22nd, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on R2 is now wearing a skirt and has a detachable center foot mount!
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Fixing the rockler bearing and more body work..

Will this never end..?

Today, I have suffered from a gigantic cold, but managed to crawl out of bed around lunchtime and did some work on the droid!

First off, I took my Lee Valley Rockler Bearing, and decided to clean it up to get it to spin better. It did spin fairly ok, I thought, but never more than maximum 3/4 of a lap when I spin it around.

So, I emptied the bearing out from all metal balls, dried up the groves from grease, actually cleaned them up with dishwashing liquid before going over them with my dremel and a steel brush.

Once complete, I replaced all the metal bearing with acetal self-lubricating bearings and added a touch of silicone grease for good measure.

The result? … well … look at this!

So, after the rockler done, The rest of the day has been spent with doing a little tidbit here and there. Mostly, this has been fixing small issues, and I also continued in cleaning up the hatch edges, and gluing them in place.

I also cut up a resin power coupled and did a temporary mount of the front one, just to check..

Starting to look pretty good, I think.

I also sanded the aluminum coin return slightly, to get away from the silvery shine..

On the backside, I also played around with the aluminum tape to see if I could do something about the famed unpainted panel…

For the more observant of you, you may realize that tiny R2 is not featured in any of these images.

As it turns out, he’s really sad.

Tiny R2 needs a hug.

By |2016-12-06T00:01:48+01:00February 21st, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on Fixing the rockler bearing and more body work..
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More skin work and coin return!

Hello =)

I’m glad that YOU decided to read my blog again today =)

So, today has been one of those days where I made good progress, but mostly on small things that are not too visible.

I started off with gluing on the remaining pieces of the front outer skin, the hatches that will not open, the utility arms surrounds etc, and having these glued on really helps to bring out the texture in the front of the droid.

I also got around to glue the rear outer skins as well, including the small tidbits.

I looked over the hatch surrounds, the thin styrene pieces that is basically the outline of the hatches (even the ones that will not open) and I realized that I will need to touch up on most of them, and possibly redo one or two, so they are not added.

However, I had this amazing idea yesterday to try and make a coin slot using the aluminium tape to cover it with. The tape is not wide enough to cover the entire coin slot, but how much of a seam would be visible?

I figured that in worst case, I’ll get the fronts made for me 😉

Didn’t come off too bad, I think, and the seam is not visible if you are half a meter from the droid!

What do you think?

Of course, the back is not nearly as pretty as the front..

I used quite a few scrap pieces just to fasten everything in place, more than needed, but I didn’t want to wait for everything to set before trying it on, so I slabbed on a few extra styrene pieces 😉

Front of my droid, with small hatch covers glued on, ad the nice coin return.

Works pretty ok, doesn’t it?

I didn’t find a blueprint for it (only searched for about 3 minutes) so I estimated the angle. After all it was only a test.

I’ll get back to the construction store and see if they have slightly wider aluminium tape. I could work wonders with this!

I might as well, as on a personal note I don’t know how things will be in the near future.

My fiancée walked in on me giving a sponge bath to someone else today…

By |2016-12-06T00:01:53+01:00February 20th, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on More skin work and coin return!
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