Since I had friends over tonight, I’ve only had time to work on fine details, and constructing my arm boxes.
During the evening I had to show off my R2 in its present state, this time I added the wheels for the first time 🙂
Looks nice, eh? 🙂
Hello!
So, I decided to finish off my main ankles and played around with attaching them to me legs. The ankles came out great, and I drilled and tapped for 4 x m6 screws on each ankle to fasten the ankles to the legs. When this is in place, the ankles are really secure and still =)
The legs starts to look recognizable as well!
I need to do a lot more work with the plates on top of the ankles, but I had to attach them for now, just to see what it will be like!
I took a short trip to the store since I needed to get more tape, and found this among the shelves.
I thought it looked interesting, bought a roll. I figured it would be perfect for my shoulder hubs!
About the hubs… I made two lovely, almost perfect shoulder hubs, but forgot to add the screws into it before attaching the skin around it. I had to cut it up at 4 places, fiddled to get the nuts and bolts inside, and wrapped it in a second layer of 1mm styrene. This means that my shoulder hubs are 2mm wider in diameter than official specs! How horrible! 😉 Anyway, after wrapping them in aluminium tape and fastening them, this is how they came out:
Looks great, and it is real aluminium too!
A happy builder with a fully assembled leg with hub:
So, legs assembled with shoulder hubs… Time to attach them to the droid body!
Tiny R2 looking up at its bigger brother with great interest..
So much for the plastic, but what about how it looks with the dome?
Tiny R2 thinks the new droid is HUGE …
Just look at how nice the shoulder hub looks with the aluminium tape …
I know, I have only glued up the inner skins, but I still need to sand them a bit, and also sand the outer skins to get the openings nice and smooth before attaching them.
At least now it seems like I really have a droid!
Happy day!
Finally, no build is complete without a certain amount of blood sacrifice to your droid. Today, it was time for my second blood sacrifice. Definitely the worst one yet!
I don’t know how I will survive…
//Micke
So, apart from making the slip ring explanation, I did glue the inner skins in place.
It was a bit scary, as any mistake here can be hard to undo later on. Especially since I don’t have enough styrene to cut new skins!
Anyway, the whole procedure went well, took about 90 minutes in total with everything. I noticed that once the glue started setting, the whole construction is a LOT more solid than compared to just the frame with skins taped on.
These skins will now set overnight, and hopefully I’ll have time to add the outer skins in the next few days.
Once the skin was on, it was time to put some more focus on the main ankles. I sanded down the new layer of styrene on the beefy parts until they fit nice and snug, and glued them in to place.
I also decided to fasten the leg inside with 4 60mm long 6mm screws, countersunk from the inside. I will try and find white screws to replace these metal ones, but for the moment, these will do. It will also provide a good, solid fit for the legs inside the main ankles. As soon as my metal plates for the top of the ankles are made… or at least painted =)
As usual, tiny R2 is inspecting!
Now: time to spend some time into making the shoulder hubs!