Prepping front skins

So I'm doen painting the front skins and gluing the greeblies and such onto them. Time to bond the inner and outer skins and the individual panels.

The technique? Clamps. Lots and lots of clamps.

Rear skins OK

Got the inner & outer rear skins mounted today. Wound up drilling little holes in the corners and mounting using the skin mount blocks from Commando 8. Unfortunately can't do the front ones just yet due to breaking off a screw in one of the front mounts. Replacement on the way.

Also you'll notice the maintenance hatch isn't curved enough. Can't figure out how to fix that without popping everything off. All the bits & pieces are glued on with E-6000. Looks like it'll work.

A little more skin paint

So I said before I was going to leave the inner skins unpainted. Well, that's not 100% true; you know those grill kinda things in the front and back of R2 with the blue behidn them? Yeah, I'm gonna paint in the blue. Just a question of masking:

Skirt

So I got an A&A flat-pack skirt. It's basically sheet styrene that's been cut and you glue it together. I wish I'd taken more in-progress photos, but you can see the end result here:

It's pretty light and flimsy, and definitely not load-bearing, but it looks good, and should be great once I put it on and weather it a bit.

Maker Faire 2015

OK, so got to show off R2 so far again this weekend. It's the first time I've had 'em rolling around in public. Got some serious control issues, mind; it seems the rear wheels aren't tight enough to the ankles, so there's a little too much "play", making the steering unreliable. Still, I had a good time and talked to a lot of folks.

R2 on the way to the Faire

Note the clear plastic "skin" I put on so people could see R2's innards. I figured it made sense, Maker Faire and all.

Dig it: a 3-D printer big enough to print furniture.

Note to self: get one of these for R2.

The gang all parked together at the end of the day

Hey, look who else is here!

Our droids lined up Sunday. You can see the clear skin better.

And of course it wouldn't be an R2 gathering without a big of on-the-spot maintenance.

It was pretty cool. Nice to see everyone and the progress being made with the different droids. Looking forward to KC Comic Con.

Battery boxes for the feet

So I've got the PVC battery boxes for the feet, and commenced to work on getting them ready. I had the cutout points marked on the foot shells, so I transferred 'em to the battery boxes and got 'em opened up, thus:

Couple bolt holes going through, and I can fasten them on. Tada:

Also, check out what was parked at the hair place next to the hackerspace: a Tesla!

(one for me too, please)

Skin prep

So started work on getting the skins all ready. First, I (on the advice of previous builders) went through and labeled all the detachable panels and such, numbering them so I could get them back together properly later:

Next up, I punched out all the bits that needed punching-out (you'll see that I left some panels in, at first, but did eventually fully remove all of them so I could clean off the "tabs")

Now it's time to start painting. I've been going back and forth on this, but decided to just paint the outside and leave the inner skins metal. Should be a nice look for 'em.