Last night I finally got around to sand off the dome panels and paint them!
I found the secret to get rid of the spin lines quick!
First time around, I tried to just sand them in small circles with 400 grit. This didn’t seem to do anything with the spin lines.
After experimenting a bit, I realized that if I sanded along the spin lines instead of against, it went a lot faster and quicker!
A quick spray with my blue paint, straight on the metal, this is the result after having to wait a full 4 minutes or so for the paint to dry.
I also got around to finally paint my radar eye!
I actually painted it three times.. I painted it once, wasn’t happy with the masking, trued to sand off, and some paint peeled. I sanded off the entire radar eye, and painted again. Still an anomaly I did not like. This time around I sanded off just the front surface and gave it a new paint job. Looked great!
Next step was to mount all the blue panels.. and R2 looked a lot better again!
Since I had painted my second leg, I drilled up the ankle and inserted a metal tube in the pivot point and glued it in place with some E-6000.
I also decided to paint the screws to my battery boxes white, to make them more discrete.
This is the before image
And this is the after
From a little distance, it is nice and discrete!
I then spent a good few hours getting my arms mounted in my arm boxes, and my arm boxes mounted in the frame. It required a fair bit of carving, routing with my dremel, and finally go in with my metal cutter to cut off a big block of styrene inside the droid!
So… what does it look like at the moment? Well … feast your eyes on this!
Still to do:
- Make end caps for second ankle cylinder
- Wrap center ankle cylinders in aluminium tape
- Make two ankle wedges
- Mount Ankle Details
- Mount Under Shoulder Details
- Chamfer Main Foot strips
- Weather Skirt
- Weather Main legs
- Double check new wiring
…. and done!
