Yearly Archives: 2012

Looking up R2’s skirt…

After a couple of days with the flu, and still done 2 gigs and a casting session (drawback of running your own company as a performer), I was finally starting to feel good enough to get some time to do some building.

I have my list of things to go through, but nothing on that list seemed appealing to me today.

I did, however, start with drilling holes under the bottom plate of my droid, to have decent mount points for my octagon ports!

I took out the octagon ports, measured up on the bottom of the droid where the openings in the skins were, and then used a quick paper template in order to measure out where I needed to drill and countersink.

These will be underneath the droid, and will not be noticed. Technically speaking, I could glue countersunk M3 screws in place and bondo on top of them, if I don’t want the screws to be seen, but partly, I need to get the correct length screws, and partly, I don’t really see this as a problem at this point! =)

Another thing I got done while I had the droid upside down, was to treat the skirt with bondo (Tamaiya Putty, to be precise) to remove any irregularities. This will need to set until tomorrow and then sanded to smooth perfection!

After this has set and been sanded down, I think it will look just great! =)

I’m starting to run out of things to do until it is paint time… =)

By |2016-12-06T00:01:18+01:00September 22nd, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on Looking up R2’s skirt…
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Small fixes

I’ve been battling a bad flue for the past couple of days, so needless to say, the droid has not been the first of my priorities!

However, I’ve managed to drag my cold sorry head off the couch for a little while today to do some small fixes…

I’ve done a few tweaks and things that were not on my list of things to do, started rerouting the electronics and bundling up the cables to make it nice and neat, ordered a new controller, bought a 11 pin connector through ebay, since I figured I’d just make one big connector to unplug whenever I need to pull out my electronics board.

I also decided to do something about my rear unpainted panel door, or rather the panel behind it!

First, I had to re-hinge the door, as the hinge was a bit.. well .. stiff, and I wanted this to be a lot smoother.

Second, I added a small mounting bar, so I could fasten the panel with screws, rather than glue it in place. After all, it is something that I might need to remove from time to time.

Third, the panel was quite boring, and I decided to do something about it!

I’m not claiming this was a stroke of genius inspiration, I do have a quite bad flu, but it will most definitely do for now!

It’s not a big thing, it’s only a bit of images printed out and glued to the white styrene…

When added into the slot and bolted in place, it looks quite ok, actually!

Not too bad for a sick guy =)

 

By |2016-12-06T00:01:19+01:00September 20th, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on Small fixes
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Evening Post

Fourth blog entry in one day! I must be nuts!

(well… I *am* building an R2-D2..)

All of them are dealing with different aspects and different parts of the build!

First off, I fixed two things that was on the R2-2DO list that I had just been to lazy to fix: I added the ridges to the second horseshoe, and covered the second horseshoe shim in aluminium, to get that of the list.

I was then contemplating drilling larger holes for the dome ring, and have the dome ring resting not on screws but on larger knobs. This would make removing and replacing the dome much easier!

I took off the rockler bearing from the droid, and at the same time, I drilled holes for the screws in the rockler on my secondary golden dome!

Rockler was mounted again, this time I made sure it was all level, then on with the work!

I glued on magnets on the inside of the “Kenny-Panel”, and glued on small metal shims to the corners of the panel. I took the old inside from the front panel, cut it slightly to make it fit, and fit it inside the Kenny-Panel for powering the droid on and off.

The panel is right now hanging on magnets alone, but I’m going to hinge it tomorrow, to make sure it does NOT fall off! =)

Speaking of hinging: I did hinge the front large door, currently attached with CA glue, but that works just fine for now. I even added a small magnet lock to the door. At the moment I think it is too strong, but I will find a better option shortly.

I even tested it with the restraining bolt, and it works like a charm!

Originally, the bolt was meant to be higher, but I realized I had to turn the door upside down (looks the same both ways) for a better fit, so I’ll have to live with the mount point for the restraining bolt to be slightly lower than I first had counted on. Maybe this was put on by a particularly short jawa!

I also took out the main battery and the electronics board since I need to reroute most of the spider web that are cables inside the droid. I did purchase a few things to make it neater, I just need to work on the cabling a bit!

I will also need to find a better socket to attach to the electronics board. At the moment, it is all individual cables that are just attached to each other. One big connector would be a lot better!

Won’t be too hard either… At the moment, I think I’ll need like 10 channels connecting to the board…. maybe.

By |2016-12-06T00:01:20+01:00September 17th, 2012|R2-D2|Comments Off on Evening Post
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