R5 Project - Update 3

I have painted the eight panels red along with a resin set of utility arms. This is rewarding seeing parts being finished. Yet you also see every blemish in the finish of bondo you didn't sand enough and humps and valleys in bondo'd places you worked on. You can also go back and fix this with redoing it. But that's up to you. You might to cover this with weather later or build it like Ferrari factory finish if you want.

Now R5 is primed and my only mistake was leaving him bake in the Arizona sun to help the paint totally dry. That also caked on the blue tape making it hard to remove. Normally this tape comes off easy. Not so much after you cook it in AZ. Still I'd do it again as its not a big deal to remove some left over tape here and there.

Now the head is finally painted. But in the process I painted over all the panel numbers 1-8. Each red panel is slightly different in shape as its hand cut. So I'll have to just put each one of 8 in until the they all seem to work. I numbered the bottom of each panel with a sharpie so they go back into the hole they were cut out of.

Finally R5-D4's head is assembled and finished! This feels like after just over a month of work part time on it I got something done. I'm pretty much happy how it all came out.

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I have the panels installed with GOOP, but not too much incase I want to remove these one day without scaring up the head allot. The antenna is nice addition. All the little things add up. It don't seem like much when you first get an unfinished head. But when you put all the details together then the head seems more realistic. Lucas really designed his universe very well thought out.

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Here is a side view. The clap in the rear is holding the neck ladder together while the super glue bonds it. 

 

About a month or so before I got this head painted I did research on the LED system I wanted to install. I could have just installed 1 color LED lights, glued them right behind the holes and be done with it. But I wanted to be able to change the lights to different colors. So after looking around at different types of systems on the internet. I went with this LED ground effects system. Its made to be installed in wheel wells of cars for ground effects. It has a RC remote and can not only change color but light blinking patterns making for hundreds of combinations of things it can do. So instead of a static LED system if you get bored with it hit the remote and make R5 eyes tell you something else.

It have 4 flexible LED strips but I'll need to use only 2-3 of them.

Pretesting the lights looks like this system will work until I find something better to come along and replace it.