Drive System and Skin work on Q5

My new friend Oscar for some reason or another decided to part with this JAG drive system. Brand new and never used! Plus he had NP motors included, already filed down to fit in the battery boxes and drive shaft cut off! Nice. I been waiting for the JAG run to finish on that drive system like 10 months. That should be finished soon then both droids will have drive systems.

They are heavier than I had imagined and very well built and designed. Made out heavy duty steel. A seasoned builder could make a system themself. Except for the custom made gears I think.

It has the omni ball in the back which isn't manufactured anymore. I'll need to make sure I don't drive over tons of asphalt, I think it will screw up that ball a lot. I tried to hook up the wires to my plug in charger that's about 14.4 volt. Wouldn't work. So I ran the motor wires off my R5's battery and they spun just fine.

 I know I just said in this blog I'm tired of doing skins after 4-5 months of this on and off, what yesterday? I did styrene skins and cut it all out painted it and wasn't happy with the results and then did R2/R5's skins. So I might as well get started on Q5s skins since he's naked. Otherwise I"m starting to run out of things I can do at the moment on R5. I need ankles and then I can put R5 on 3 feet and start driving him around. R5 is almost done construction wise. Maybe upgrades to do later but the general build is winding down. 

So its going to get hectic doing 2 droids at once. Bye by virgin skins...

Since this is my second time around doing this I went through it in short order. Since I'm not putting hinges and servos on the door panels I can JB weld the inner skins shut and I'm not cutting out any rear doors. So I can JB weld the rear inner skins shut and save tons of time.

In 2 hours I had all the panels wiggled out or cut out. Then filed the skins and outer panel pieces, primed them and painted the outer skins black.

Then the first thing I did to the skins was drill holes on the inner skin to hold the coin slots. I have those large old school coin slots. So you either cut the coin slot, or the frame, or make your own coin slots.

Here is a photo showing the coin slot just barely hits the top of the frame where the slot is. I believe the David Shaw coin slot would fit in there. I marked were I needed to drill so mine will fit in.  

 

I drilled some holes to weaken the area then took a pliers and broke that area out. I used a file and made sure I had a tight fit. There are lots of ways to cut that out. Jigsaw or dremel, even a file if you have the time.

A test fit of the freshly painted outer skin. I haven't painted the inner yet because I ran out of paint and I was toying with the Victor Franco paint style. I think if I don't paint the inner skin that will highlight all the small panel details. But its not screen accurate. Truth is you can barely see R2-Q5 in Jedi anyway so I whatever you want to do is okay.

This droid works for evil so it probably should be as black as possible, but I just want what looks the best.

I love this photo. The contrast of the silver and black is cool.

Just a test fit. The paint won't be dry for another day or so. I'll try a few test fits and decide on the Victor or full black paint style in a few days. Its cool to have a new droid and one thats a different color. Its like I just got married all over again with droid building from the start. The dark side is strong in this one.

Today while I was taking the skins apart I wondered if I should even by painting anything? With R5 I prepainted all the parts. As the blog shows I wrecked all of them during assembly and repainted a second time. So am I wasting my time painting this? Hopefully not.

The parts drying on the diving board. Good day to paint around 70 degrees today and will be 80 next week. I always wait 2 full days until I handle parts after paint. Sometimes if you wait 1 day your fingerprints can imprint on the paint. So I won't mate the inner and outer skins until all of its dry and taped up with 3M. There are a couple of copper panels and 1 silver panel in the photo. The center vents are getting a new coat of silver. Then I'll have to paint the inside black. 

The red utility arm is the top crooked one I have for R5 that I never fixed yet. I poored GOOP inside and waiting for it to dry. Then I'll try to drill out a better hole and fix it.

On another good note. I thought I might have blow up part of my JEDI control. After checking everything I got servos working again on it. I spent a couple of hours yesterday writing JEDI code and testing custom programs. So when I don't have parts to deal with I have code to write and check on the droid.