Stormtrooper

A couple of minor updates within the last few days, that in itself were not big enough to warrant a blog post, but now..

First off, I took the daring step of drilling hole in my shell for the split loom. I had previously 3d printed a loom holder, and it was time to jump off the cliff..

I marked off where the loom would pass through the shell, and step drilled the hole up to 30mm, which was the diameter of my holder, then used my dremel to cut down from the half circle to the bottom of the shell.

A little sanding and filing, and it turned out pretty good.

Can’t wait for my proper motherboard to arrive so I can start mounting things. I did have to bondo and sand and repaint a bit around the hole, but that was fixed as well as the bondoed piece on the right.

In addition to this, I got a new shipment of fun pieces. Not all of these are accurate, but to my defense, I ordered some of these prior to finding the proper ones.

Having almost all pieces in place, I decided it was time for my first pic with placement of most parts.

I still intend to replace most resin parts with aluminium, but until I have them, the resin parts will do.

It was about here I found how wonky some parts of the shell is. The upper left corner where the ion arm is supposed to sit had a height difference of 3 mm from the corner to the inner corner of the ion arm placement. I had to balance the resin ion arm (that I had sanded flat) on an m3 nut on the inner corner for it to not fall down.

To fix this, I decided to mask off parts of that shell, sand down the highest points and add loctite putty to build up a base. It took me about 45 minutes to fix, but the result was pretty good.

You can clearly see the bulk that was build up. Dry fitting with the ion arm leaves this:

Nice and flat!

The shell went out on the balcony for a bit of touch up on the hammerite black paint, and once that’s dry, most of the shell work should be done.

I also hot glued in my coloured lenses for the power bar and the cyclotron…

… only to realize that I have RGB LED’s in my light pack, and the program does four different colours, so I had to cut them off. Oh well 🙂

I also took out the metal parts and the black glossy plastic box of my 3d printed ghost trap, courtesy of countspatula and went over them with flat black before assembling again.

I have built in a remote control in my pedal to not have to use the hose for anything functional at all, and I decided to also wire up the LED on the remote to a small LED on the pedal. It is not very bright, but a nice little addition, I think.