Building

Ankle Work

Since the dawn of time… well.. since R2 was finished originally, that is, he’s had a pair of heavy resin bulks under the Ankle Cylinders.

The Ankle Cylinders was scratch built 3 years ago, and was basically a piece of PVC pipe with thin strips of styrene wrapped around it, with custom made end caps.

See this post for the original build: Scratch building ankle cylinders! They have done the trick up until now, but I wanted to have a set that looked a bit better.

The main reason for revisiting this, is that the original pieces have only been taped to the ankle with double stick tape that has (mostly) done the job, but they have had a tendency to fall off.

I don’t want to glue things in place here, as if I need to do any work on the cables inside, I need to be able to remove these to get to an access hole that is hiding behind them.

I had also lost a few of the ankle wedges (see Building an ankle wedge) that is supposed to sit on top of the cylinders. They were also just taped to the ankle…

The total assembly looked like this:

(Mounting the Ankle… stuff)

But now it was time to fix everything in this area. I had not been 100% happy with the aluminium tape wrapped around the pipe, even if it has done the job.

So, armed with my trusty CAD program, the avid reader know that I have been printing Ankle Cylinders in the past.

This is the parts that I drew and printed:

These were printed apart to get the grooves in the cylinder as sharp as possible.

The new ankle cylinders holders. 3D printed, hollow and extremely light. I have glued 12mm magnets inside them for holding them to the ankle later on.

Here are the new wedges. They are a lot sturdier and better than my old ones! These ones also has magnets inside them. The idea is to pin the wedge inbetween them.

Like this.

Since I can disassemble these, it makes for easy painting.

End pieces sanded and ready for painting!

I started off by painting them with a filler primer. I chose this as it fills up any imperfections after not sanding enough, or print imperfections.

A dab of the old “Satin White” ..

… and some R2 Blue…

… add a little rub and buff …

… and the assembly should be ready for mounting on the droid.

I must say I am very happy with the results. The rub and buff really looks like metal!

Next up, fixing the magnets to the droid..

All in all, a great upgrade. Next up is adding the new Ankle Details in aluminium and then weather the new pieces on the ankle.

Finale assembly:

By micke|2016-12-06T00:00:10+01:00August 30th, 2015|Building, R2-D2|Comments Off

Small things…

… becomes really cute when they are reduced to miniature size.

At least that’s what my fiancée keeps telling me.

Just have a look at this lovely Battery Box Harness I CADed last night and pulled off the printer this morning.

Unfortunately, they were the only parts I could rescue off my build plate… Need to tweak print settings again….

Now, these *would* have been really nice if I hadn’t aborted the print….

It is a constant learning curve…

By micke|2016-12-06T00:00:10+01:00August 27th, 2015|Building, Mini-R2|Comments Off

#NOTBUILDINGBB8

I’m not building BB-8!

Nope!

I really didn’t like that droid when I first saw it.

Who’s Bb-8 you might ask?

Well, he’s that little round fella from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer.

The little round one.

Yes.

THIS one:

There’s only one small problem:

As soon as it rolled out on stage in Anaheim during Celebration VI my jaw dropped.

Up until then, I thought it was nothing but a CGI robot made for comic relief, but to SEE this on stage (even though it was on youtube) blew my mind!

But … still … #NOTMAKINGBB8!

At least not as far as my fiancée is concerned…

The story of BB-8 started back in 1974, when George Lucas still wanted to make “The Star Wars” as it was called back then. Having the Legendary (capital L deserved) Ralph McQuarrie on board to do his visuals, they started an epic journey that… well … I digress.

One of the early designs for R2-D2 by Ralph featured the droid balancing on one wheel.

Something not possible at the time. Fortunately for us, J.J. Abrams took the AWESOME decision to stay true to much of Ralph McQuarries ideas and designs when designing the forthcoming Star Wars films, and so, BB-8 was born.

After seeing it on stage in Anaheim (unfortunately not in person, I watched it on youtube at home), my mind started thinking… how would I build a droid like that… and I soon came up with a blueprint that would explain it all:

Or … well … maybe not. But a fan online had looked at BB-8 and like me (I guess) compared it to the size of R2-D2 and extrapolated and calculated and … guessed.. and came up with this:

Not completely accurate, it was still a very good start.

Thanks to a few very resourceful persons, M & T, you know who you are, I have started on a new journey with this little droid. At the moment, I am content with just doing the dome, but who knows… in the future maybe? I think I have a solution for how it actually works…

It all started with printing a lot of parts on my trust Makergear M2:

A box of parts, really.

The first piece I printed was the front third of the dome: I used PLA for this, as it warps a LOT less and less chance of cracking, like ABS.

I was VERY surprised about the support towers showing in the back. They are standing on nothing (since I forgot to add a helper disk where they start), and was really sturdy!

Thanks to the BuildTak, they managed to stay put the entire print, and made me this lovely piece:

A few more pieces followed, and..

.. we have something that already looks like a dome!

The (almost see through) red PLA was the roll I had that I’ve used the least. I figured if I was going to paint this anyway, why not use a colour I would never use for anything else…