More work on 3P0

I have a bunch of aluminum arrive recently so work progresses on this project.

I realized the neck area will take alot of stress so I made some plates to reenforce this area so the entire head isn't stressing the fiberglass.

The plate installed from the top.

View of plate from the bottom.

The plate is hard to see with the head on. It will be hidden by the neck after I figure out how I'm doing the neck. One problem is the head won't turn left or right now. These plates pushed the servo down so far the linkage don't connect. So after a trip to Ace Hardware I got smaller spacers on the servo and now it work again. So I can continue to play around with the head with my transmitter and have friends toy with it and not worry about the fiberglass cracking in that area. If it does crack I won't see it under the round plates until the head one day snaps off.

The belly section is simply some ribbed rubber with any spare or junk wires you have laying around. I'm not sure how to attach them just yet and have little clips holding them in place. I might JB weld the wire ends onto the top part of the rubber. Then JB weld magnets on the rubber to attache to magnets on the inside of the torso.

With the torso over the belly it starting to look more official now. In my next update I'll get to working on the skeleton and how this will rotate and bend over a little.

This the battery box I made today that will power this droid. A single 12 volt that will be strapped into this box. On top of this will be a 6 inch rockler bearing that will be arriving in a couple of days. Then a top plate over the ring and the skeleton will mount onto that. This is 12x6 inches. It won't fit inside the torso but it's not supposed to. This will eventually sit around where the shorts will be. I don't have shorts so I have no idea what size to make this. I can cut this down to smaller when the time comes if I need to.

These are the legs I have. One of them is cracked and will need to be repaired the other leg is just fine. These will need a hell of a lot of clean up work to remove the areas where the mold seams are. So I picked the leg with out the crack to start on and see how much work this will need to get this part looking good.

Here is one side after alot of dremel work. Its so hot outside now around 110 I'm worried I'll over heat my dremel so I use it on and off. Next time I'll have both of mine and after I use 1 for 5 minutes I'll put in a bucket with freezing cool packs so it can cool down and rotate them doing this. These are made out of resin this creates a hell of a mess. Then center ring area of these legs will need a small fine bit to get the material removed. I'm always up for a challenge.

This is turning out decent. It will need some bondo work in places. This all depends on how much detail I want. Most of us make these so accurate down to the 1 foot distance of stuff nobody will ever see.

Unless you butcher this only fellow 3P0 builders who have the eye on how every inch needs to look, nobody will ever know if you have small mess ups. The average person looks at something like this for a minute as they wait for a selfie. Then get a photo standing a few seconds away from it and walk away. This droid won't have the $2,000 paint job but to make up for that most of it will be animated to the point I can let some kids play with this robot.

I have more parts incoming but my next update will be on my R4 and R5 fiberglass domes that I'm about to get my hands on.

My Animatronic C-3P0 Project

Now that I have 2 astromechs done with basic construction. I'm moving forward on a plan I had over 6 years ago to create a full sized animatronic C-3P0.

I started with a SPT200 Direct Drive Pan & Tilt System I bought from Servo City and I put the kit together. It's rated to move around 2 pounds which is exactly what my fiberglass C-3P0 head weighs.

 I got parts of an awesome 3P0 from Randy over at SithPlanet.

 I marked on the neck area where I need to drill out the holes needed to mount the lower servo. I'm not using the black plastic lower mounting plate at this point because that is going to be replaced by the neck section.

So it turned out this was pretty easy to do. Now I have the pan and tilt head installed and mounted to the body. For now I'm not using the droids neck area yet so I can adjust and see if I can get this all to function.

After checking out some height issues of how high or low I can place the head onto this pan head and still keep it movie accurate. I drilled out 2 areas on the side of the pan head and added stand offs for 10-32. This will be used to connect the pan head to the 3P0 head.

The 3P0 had its earring fastened to the head with 10-32 bolts that fastened to a nut to the neck section. So I just bolted them into my stand offs I got from Acehardware. I was wondering if I tighten this too much the earrings would strip out but they held up to alot of pressure. This got me pretty tight but I later added a flat bar (not pictured) over the pan head and by adding that it make this rock solid.

Here is my first test video of it. It seems to work. The servos will need to be slowed down and the EPA needs to be adjusted so they don't hit any part of the body they shouldn't. I'm not sure just yet how to get the servos to stop growling. But this wasn't too bad for a couple of hours of work.

To be continued...