Arizona Build Day At Tom's House!

 

Tom hosted a build day at his house. It was a bit cold for Arizona weather, a chilly 65 degrees with scatter showers. But it was a lot of fun and Tom's garage is larger than most peoples house. Its huge! I brought as many droids and parts that I could fit in my truck.

Early to arrive in the day was myself and a new builder I met 1vaderfan if I remember right. He's been in the club for a while but just now building his droid. He handled power tools very well and learned like a sponge of anything he don't know yet. He'll make a great droid builder. I'd keep an eye on his build it should be very very nice. His droid is on the the left side of the photo above and next to it is R2-Q5 but I put my R5 dome on him.. His frame is anodized black so it looks must like Q5's skins. 

My goal for the day was easy. Mount the skins on my frame and then see what else I could do to help others or go to work on parts I brought. 1vaderfan got alot done. He got his rockler ring mounted. Then the JAG dome plate on that. Then the aluminum lower R2 ring the HDPE ring on to that and then the inner dome dry fitted. That's quite a bit of work to accomplish in 1 day and now he knows more about R2 dome building than me! Tiny and David are kind and show up to help out the new AZ builders and offer advice on how parts should be made or fabricated.

We seem to have build days 3-4 times a year. If your local to AZ don't miss one of these there lots of fun and you'll learn tons of things. This build was also broadcast on a webcam and we had about 10 viewers watching on and off. I took turns with others chatting with people watching, answering questions and moving the camera on what people were asking to see closeups of.

 

Now my skins are screwed onto the frame. The alignment isn't perfect and needs to be fixed because of large gaps inbetween part of the skins.. I have a few ideas on how to tighten the gaps. I'll try out some ideas to show you my fix because I know that 100 people have these skins in 2011 alone and will have the same issues arrive infront of them.  But since my 2nd droids is barely 1 month old I think I'm flying thru progress and will keep going forward.

Check out the cracks! I have some bad spacing inbetween the skins I need to tighten. I have so many things to do on these droids I'm not going to stop and pittle around trying to recover 1/16th of an inch right now. I'll get back to this after I think it over many times. Lets keep building.

Like myself and having the same name too. Tom is building 2 droids at once so its pretty hetic. He has the same CommB frame I do on R2-Q5. He is also building a tube framed droid and spent a lot time cutting wood for that droid. I know he got alot of progress done today also.

 

1vaderfan got a lot of work done today and his inner dome put on top of this. Tiny P is like a Mr. Spoke who can see things on droids most people's eye will never look at. I showed Tiny some boosters and those hydros that go in them, he'll tell you if they were built wrong and what you need to do to correct it. Amazing whats in this brain.