Rear Skin Done

I did my first test mount of my rear skin. I fixed the wrecked paint from the clamps. I ran into some issues about Rustoleum changing what I was using in the middle of this. I Ended up painting this part 4 times to try to get all the parts to match. See I painted all the rear skins months ago. Including the back door which is about to be assembled next.

Almost there! I still need to add velcro on the lower skins to attach to the side beams so it fits tighter.

So the plan for tomorrow is to take the rear door off the hinges. Remove the hinges and start test fitting the door and figure out how I'm going to just use velcro to hold it on. Plus I don't like exactly how the skin holds onto the door frame. There are spots that should be tighter so I'll probably retap a few areas.

Also I made sure I didn't put too much super glue on the two large rear doors. I'll probably end up with some more hinges someday and get bored and say. Hey lets hinge those rear doors a few dozen blog posts from now.

Electronics on the droid have been offline for about a month until I get proper fuses for the rig runner. The default fuses are too high and I'm ordered a bunch of 3-5 amps fuses to protect my gear from blowing up.

Periscope Lifter Arrives

I got me some new parts for the R2-D2 head. Thank's to Wayne Astromechs main dude, he deciding to part with this Periscope Lifter. Some parts are simply cooler than others. This actually 'does something'! It will lift up a periscope up or down or you could use it in other robots for something. One question all your friends ask you is: How much did that cost? Followed by: What does it do?

These kind of custom made parts in limited runs make your droid come alive from the default static mode you start out with. Now if I only had a periscope to mount on this. Another reason I've been wanting this part was to study it. I want to copy its functionality to make a carousel of 3 of these in 1 larger device. The idea is to have it behind both large doors on the body and be able to spin around so 1 of 3 different types of arms can extend out, then move up and down then retract. Close the front doors, hit a button to rotate the carousel, door opens again and then a new type of arm comes out and does stuff. That would blow my mind! Its something I'd hope to see if Steve Jobs joined the R2 builders and put some type of money thing going into this crazy droid project.

I probably won't be working on this R2 dome until the summer or fall. I collected lots of parts but need much more until I can put it all together. I have the 300 MM dome, dome base plate, front and rear logic parts from David Shaw. I need the radar eye and HPs as this is an aluminum build. It might be another year or so until I run into that.

For some odd reason I got back into collecting action figures again. I seem to do this in spurts here and there over the years. I have a decent astromech collection of around 43 of them and starting to collect various protocol droids.

I think I have another 200 figures in the closet in packages that were never opened.

You can't ever have enough storm troopers or droids.

300 MM Dome Arrives in time for Christmas

The 300 MM Dome arrives right in time for Christmas. Now my droid isn't just stuck as R5-D4. I can also one day have R2-D2 whenever I get this dome finished. I have some many parts in work. The rear skins are drying in what I hope is its final paint. When I'm waiting on paint to dry I relax and play guitar and retain what I'm learning from it. 

Once back on the droid, I'll mount the rear skins and focus on finishing how I'm going to do my rear door. After the rear and front skins are done I'll start messing around on this R2-D2 dome. Oh, ya in 3 weeks I'll be ordering another R2 dome in plastic so I'll have 2 dome builds nearly going at once! Plus I plan to cook up a plan to put that R4 head together in the next 60 days. I also have another frame coming in next month and will be building this Comm8A frame doing with a Comm8B droid for R2-Q5 in a short 4 month build. Crazy, yup~

The dome comes double boxed in double sided re-enforced cardboard. It also has holes predrilled for the rocker bearing ring along with the hardware to fasten it.

I was able to take the inner dome and HDPE ring right out of the box and take off my R5 head. It sat perfectly on top of my droid on the first time. How about that for excellent standards in an open source group of builders!!!

2010 has been one crazy year for me. I got the Star Wars bug again but this time solely on droids and spent most of my year collecting parts for a while. Then when I got a bunch of them my build started and split into multiple droids and robots and I think I'll be working on some type of robot for rest of my life now. There is always something fun to create.

Wrecked My Paint

I took all the clamps off and found I wrecked my paint. This time the little black clamps dug into the paint. They didn't do this to the front skin. Oh well I had planned to JB weld the crap out of this and repaint it anyway. Minor setback.

The VHB tape only works well enough to do basic skin bonding. You'll run into parts like this that need to be glued together.

 So I superglue it and then clamp for 20 minutes and move section to section until its all locked together.

This is what it looks like 15 minutes later after superglue. I so far used 3 bottles of this stuff on my droid so far.

Spot gluing various sections that need it. Then moving on to putting some JB weld on the some of the seems.

Imperial Parts and Skin Work

Right now I'm a R2 builder and a second droid parts collector. I started collecting parts a while ago and now started to amass a decent second set. So its time to get to work on my second build. My second frame should be here within 30 days so time to get some parts or skins painted black. These resin pieces will go into R2-Q5. I'd like to bring 2 droids to Phoenix Comicon 2011and Droidcon and that means I gotta work my ass off. Because these painted black pieces you see are the first parts on my second droid that has to be completed in 3 months and 1 week!

Black front coin return (left) by power and copper power coupler (center) with a freshly painted coupler (right), one of the shoulder buttons painted copper (top). This copper color is just the match I want but the paint itself is tricky to apply. The button above wasn't primed, but this copper is so light. I had to put on 6 coats! With the black power couplers only 2 coats of copper were needed. That was weird! I test painted other parts with copper and it covers black the fasted. This is good to know as I have a more parts to paint in the future. One day this droid will look like this. (image credit rebel scum)

One thing my mind is working on is a solution to installing these parts on the skins in methods other than superglue and JB weld as I'm currently doing. I'd like to see a velcro or bolt on/off or magnet solution. This way you could easily unfasten these parts, change them out with various colored parts and make a new droid. That's hard when its all JB welded to hell and back. The idea in a perfect high tech world solution is superglue with nano negatively charged magnets you put on 1 part. Then superglue with positively charged nano magnets on the other parts. They'd bond together with no visible means microscopically. That most likely won't turn up in a google search yet. But some type of standard like David Shaw has should evolve so we can do this with future parts.

Here is the type of paint I'm using. Ace brand black semi gloss. No opinion yet as its my first can.

 Krylon copper in the center. Works okay if you prime first or paint black. On the right is Rusteoleum white semi gloss. This is my 5th can! But I only used about 2 full can of those 5. It has a nice finish if you let it dry for two days. But out of 5 cans, 2 were DOA. Only 1 can I got to empty. The other 2 cans when they got half empty spitted out white blobs that wasn't cool on finish paint of expensive parts. I open new cans of white when putting on 'final' coats.

The results are really good with this white can but half of the cans are duds.

A lot of people ask how thick is that VHB tape? Well here it is applied on my rear skin. When you sandwich the skins together you won't notice it at all. Keep in mind this isn't super glue. Its tape. It's merely a good method to mend most of your skins together in a first step. You'll need some other adhesive to weld together other parts of the skin that share more of the load these skins will take.

Here we go again with the clamps. I'm clamping the inner and outer rear skin. The full rear door was cut out a couple of months ago. That part of the build wasn't any fun so I finished the front. Now I'm completing the rear section. Tomorrow I'll take off the clamps and spot superglue any weak spots with the clamps.

Here I'm just goofing around going for a clamp record. If you don't know what that is you haven't surfed Astromech enough. You don't need to put this many clamps on. But how many times in your life are you going to clamp together R2-D2's skin? Have some fun with your expensive robot!

Sanding R5 Head Ring More

I did a couple of hours of work today. I added a db 25 cover to the end of the male slip ring. I was watching it spin from underneath barely clearing the Pittman motor. I figured I better cover those small solder wires incase the male part accidently hits something if it came apart.

I found these at Fry's Electronics for .79 in plastic as you see here. They also had them in aluminum for a couple of bucks but it weighed a lot more. I'm trying to keep the weight down so I went for plastic.

I never really finished the lower ring of the R5 head the way I had wanted it. I sanded it a lot back when working on it with an electric sander and 50 grit. But I can still see the spin rings in and it was bored and decided to take them out.You can see these spin rings on the left side of the photo. The right portion of the photo shows what happens when you use 120 grit on a mouse sander.

This photo shows a couple of imperfections that need to be sanded out. I guess I'm picky, at some point I'll go thru this a second time and make the ring look even better. You don't have much to work with on R5 so max out what you got.

I slowly sanded them all out with 120 grit. Then put 240 grit on the mouse and gave it another pass. After that it was hand sanding going from 320, 400, 600 grit paper. I even went to 1600 grit but got tired of sanding and said let's just polish this with Mothers.

 This is pretty close to how I want the silver ring to look. There are a few spots I needed to sand more with 600 and higher grits. Looks pretty good for just a few hours. When I get bored I'll pop the head off and put a few more hours in the spots I want to polish up better. I just use Mothers and a grinder with a buffing wheel I'm rigged up.

Right now the head weighs 19 pounds. You can still hear the motor groin when it spins. I need to somehow reduce weight. But where? I think one of the few things I could do is get rid of the upper plate that holds the pie panel pieces on. That might reduce 1 pound. But I'd end up adding servos and in the end adding more weight.

Skin Update and JEDI Custom Codes

I finally got off my butt and installed the aluminum power coupler. I've had this piece for a while. I was hoping to get a David Shaw bolt on piece. However I didn't want to wait what could be 1 - 2 years for a run so I went forward with what I could find. 

This is an old school one. I don't know who built it. Here is some of the parts painted Krider blue. I put a small curve into the main circle with my sander and a file.

I blue taped the white painted parts around this area. Then clamped in the round part and tweaked it until I like its final resting place. Then I put a bead of super glue around it on the back side. Then a healthy fingers worth of JB weld over that about 1 hour later. I let the skin sit for 24 hours until the JB weld dries almost completely. I'm happy with it.

I found out its going to be a few months until I can get the aluminum center vents so I decided to just mount my resin versions for a while and finish up the front skins. Soon I"ll put these aside for a few months or just mount them on the Comm8A frame. I plan to start hooking up servos to open the doors. But I have many more jobs infront of me that I'll probably get side tracked with.

I have the rear door to get back to and finish that up just like I did the front skins. That will keep me busy for atleast a month. By then the frame for the 2nd droid will be here and I can paint it black and start my 2nd build.

This just arrived today so now I'm up to 3 complete sets of aluminum skins.

Introducing droids skin #2 and #3. The nearly finished skin above is #1. This skin will serve as R2-D2 and R5-D4 and be servoed and pimped to the max. Droid #2 will be a black imperial droid that will be mounted to a CommB frame. The #3 skin will be painted red. If I use the skin snaps right all three skins will be interchangeable on both of my frames.

The other thing I got done today is messing around with programming my JEDI control system to understand more how it works. Today's lesson was writing my own custom JEDI strokes. If you have the JEDI installed and want to follow along try the following. 

///Near the bottom of your startup.txt file add this.

'Setup User defined J.E.D.I. stroke commands here

SET JEDI 1, 32  "music.txt"        'Assign JEDI stroke "32" on button 2 to play music box

'Play a startup sound to tell that this startup JawaScript file is finished
SET MP3 1 VOL 85
PLAY 1, "startsnd.mp3"

///Next create a text file called music.txt and put in your thumbdrive. Add the following code.

'music box

'Play a sound alerting people of effect
PLAY 1, "SONG1.MP3"        ‘Play the first mp3, name it explicitly here

///last step is put a song on the thumbdrive and make sure its named song1.mp3

You should be done now. Boot up your droid and do JEDI stroke of 32 and that should say song1 is playing. This is the start of using your droid to play other than Star Wars things and make it a multimedia player too. My next code lesson will be adding more songs or doing it randomly from a ton of them.