Making Your Own Coin Returns

There are three Coin Returns on a droid. The front one is alittle different in size then the rear two. If you have the 'John Sherrell Aluminum Skins' you can make Coin Returns out of guess what? The aluminum Coin Returns you snapped out of the laser cuts. Here is how that's done.

First download the official plans from the Yahoo group. Get to know your Coin Retuns which are front and which are back. Make it easy on yourself by labeling each and every part you snap out of your aluminum skins. Even for parts you might thing about throwing away. You can reuse allot of this.

The tools I'm using to do this post are. A band saw, dremel, disc sander, files, pencil, super glue, metal ruler and clamps.

First of all your Coin Return from the 'John Sherrell Skins needs about 1/8 of an inch shaved off the top and bottom. Use the official plans and a digital caliper to make them the correct size then proceed to the photo below.

I marked the plans and then then cut out the center with a dremel. Then I use a hacksaw blade in a tiny hand cutter to finish the rest. 

Here is an example of my 4th attempt. Nearly perfect dremel cuts. Keep in mind to make the perfect Coin Return we work on the opposite site of the metal. In other wards were on the back side that we'll reverse later so any slip ups of the dremel on the skin won't be seen. Nor pencil marks and such.

After you do a rough hand cut out the inner piece. Place the Coin Return into a clamp and tighten it. Using a file you can now safely grind the aluminum down to your drawn out lines. Rotate the piece and file away until you're finish. This won't take long the metal is very thin.

After filing your Coin Return it should look like this.

Pictures above is the front Coin Return.  I super glued the bend back piece to see how it fits.

Here is the backside. Note the white bend part I super glued on the back is made from the left over AL that you have behind the center vents. The two side peaces can be made from the utility arm scrap. 

Now super glue and clamp the sides on for a 1/2 and hour and get the JB Weld ready. Or GOOP or whatever you fancy for gluing this stuff together.

Now JB Weld it, that's what I've found so far to work like liquid steel. This stuff very hard to cut with exacto knifes and seems like you could tap into it. I might try that but anyway this is the next step to assembly of the part.

 Here is a shot of the front. Not too bad.  It needs sanding or filing of the bottom and top. You could call it quits and here. Or you could add some filler and make the part pass HD quality inspection. Which I'm gonna do. So let's push it farther to movie quality or machined part run. Keep in mind you save about $100 while making these parts yourself instead of waiting on an AL run. Plus it ups your confidence level to build more complex parts and see what the styrene builders go thru.

The flip the skin skin is on the right with the pencil marks, bad cuts on the left.

Here is a rear coin return the version on the right is my best so far after doing this about four times now. I kinda of learned the ins and outs after a few of them. I don't like my painted versions I've done previously. You touch those versions and you blemish the paint. That's not good enough a solution for a droid. But the basics don't change from above. Keep making one at a time and each time you'll make a more accurate one each time.