R2-Q5 is Done!

I finished basic construction on R2-Q5 and later found some photos of this droid from deleted scenes of Return of the Jedi.

I based the paint scheme on this droid based mainly on the Hasbro toy and the few photos of the full sized droid which was on the Deathstar in ROTJ.

Photos of the droid in front and back. Not the best photos, slightly out of focus.

After looking at these photos of Roger Nichol's droid room showing a full sized R2-Q5 I decided to go with the paint on the real droid and not the toy. This means I have to change a few things, or really paint more stuff and remove paint from the front logics.

If you look closely at this deleted scene from the Bluray of ROTJ. R2-Q5 has his large upper panel painted copper along with some of the dome panels. This is not on the Hasbro toy. But I can make my droid more screen accurate knowing this. So its time to get to work. I have this droid going to a Phoenix Comic Con in 7 days and I can't take him apart. So I'll drive him outside and mask and paint him there.

 Now all masked up. I'm going to be painting the large door on 'his' right and all of the panels except the HP.

In the rear I'm painting the large long panel to match what's in the deleted scene from ROTJ.

So I start painting and notice the can is beginning  to run low, the paint is starting to spit out large blobs. Time to go to the store and get another can of the same paint.

Oh, but wait! I'm using Krylon 2908 Copper and they don't sell it no more:( I bought this can 5 years ago and it lasted for all the parts so far. So I run to Home Depot and Lowes they don't sell Krylon at all.

So I go to AceHardware where I bought this can and get Ace brand copper paint which out of the 3 stores is the closest match I found. Amazon has only 6 cans of this paint Krylon 2908 left. But they don't sell via prime and it will take about 10 days to get that paint and I have a Comicon in 7 days.

So what do I do with the 3 panels partly painted? I gotta just use this new paint. With my luck, they are close but don't match:( The new can of paint has a brighter copper and my older paint had a slightly darker copper. But nobody will be able to tell unless I point that out.

A couple hours after the paint was put on. It's looking much closer to the movie droid from ROTJ now. I still have to paint the outer feet strips copper and remove the front logics and remove the black paint and return that to silver. But I'll do that after the con is over.

Side view. This is the first photo of it complete with all the parts on it. The newest parts I added are the shoulder hubs and the booster covers. I had resin boosters I was using on this droid. They are smaller than the aluminum versions and they were a bit warped. With these you have to drill and tap where you want the bolts which fasten it to the leg. I could not get the bolts perfectly and just grabbed my blue booster covers off R5-D4 and painted them black. I was running out of time and had to make due.

1 other thing that is not screen accurate are the silver hydro piston thingys are supposed to be black instead of silver. I just think it looks cooler with silver than black, because otherwise hell the entire droid is just black.

Rear view: Now the back matches what is in the deleted scene that best I could from the above ROTJ photo.

Me and this guy have a lot of adventures and good times coming soon. I'm pretty happy with how he turned out. When I had the dream of building this droid I just wanted something simple. A black droid that drove, had lights and sounds and that's it. Nothing else, so I kept the skins closed and had nothing else I wanted to do with it.

I can't stop now. I've learned so much over the past 5 years I want to apply all the cool things I did with my R5 and do all of that in this droid where I can.

So I plan to install servos to control atleast the front holoprojector and install some LED light in the front and back and a red light on the top HP.

I'm going to open all the front skin doors and I'm going to use my droid Zapper to come out the little front door on the left like you see when R2-D2 zaps the chain off Leia to free her. I'm going to replicate that since this is a ROTJ droid.

I'm also going to get the utility arms to open and close with servos like I'm currently working on for R5. I have plenty of servos and time to take this to the max.

I'm also getting another dome so I can convert this droid to R5-J2. I just need the dome and I have plenty of parts to swap and make this droid which look like it can kill people on the Deathstar who don't belong there.

Let's hope they have plenty of imperial droids in Rogue One!