R5-J2.39 Days 2 & 3

 

Poor little R5 is having some issues, and his progress has slowed to a crawl, as we attempt to fix various issues. When I originally put him together, I had used a glue that though it was packaged the same as the other stuff, wasn't the same type of glue (this is why you ALWAYS read the fine print!). I had hoped that it might be ok, since the frame was incomplete anyway, but when I picked it up, all of the vertical support braces fell off. I went through and pulled off a couple that didn't fully break and re-glued everything with the right stuff and left it to dry. I have an upcoming final though, so I won't be able to get much more done on him tonight.

R2-P.39 Days 2 & 3

 Now that his body is -mostly- done, we've moved on to R2-P.39's dome, using masking tape to mark off the areas where the paneling will go, and drilling out areas as necessary. We were having some issues with getting the layout nice and straight, so we took a strip of styrene and drove a pin through it, then heated the pin to push it through the top of the dome, like so:

What this left us with was a guide that we could rotate, which gave us the ability to draw perfectly straight lines on the curved dome. Next, we covered the areas that had paneling with blue painter's tape and used an xacto knife to remove the areas of tape for painting. However, when we started to cut out the masks for the dome we discovered that the masking tape was peeling up silver paint underneath. Since border between the silver and green needs to be crisp there are only two ways to fix that. Either mask the outside of the panels and paint, remove the mask, mask the inside of the panels and paint again, or take all the masking off, re-paint the silver of the dome in a more durable fashion and re-mask the panels. My dad decided to go with redoing the silver paint.

So now we've taken a step back, and I might get the dome ready for re-painting when I get home from school for the day. 

We've also added his "neck" to the dome, three rings of styrene at the base wrapped another styrene bearing surface that provides the dome with some horizontal support, while allowing room for any electronics. With such a tiny robot, all the room will be taken up!

We've also made some great progress on the skirt of this little guy. It's been constructed, glued, and clamped to the frame and left to dry. His skirt is slightly small, since we used the inside circles of the frame rings for it, to save on materials and money.

 It's all coming together!

Some more photos of P.39's dome masked off (before we re-did it)

R5-J2.39 Day 1

Poor little R5 isn't as far along as his R2 counterpart... but I do have finals to study for over the next couple of days, so I had to cut my build session short. Most of R5's frame pieces are cut and ready to go, and I just need to get him put together. Here though, you can really see some of the warped styrene, which is making building the frame a little difficult. It's not as noticeable on the big pieces, and doesn't seem to affect them as much, but on these .39 scaled versions, it's causing us a little bit of trouble.

At this point, we've also decided to make some major changes to the frame, mostly taking out many, if not all of the upright supports and replacing them with threaded rod and covers, much like R2 CTHRU, which I ran across when doing research for this little project.

One of CTHRU's most notable features is the distinct lack of a million upright supports, and it makes sense to change some of them out for the threaded rod, as it will leave some more room for electronics, especially in the .39 scale versions. For now though, we'll finish these frames as-is, in the hopes that there's still more to learn from this design.

Next up, I need to cut and piece together my little R5's head, since I'm not doing an R2 or R3 unit, I can't use a dome from IKEA like dad is...

R2-P.39 Day 1

At the end of day 1, this is what P.39 looks like. The poly styrene frame is complete, and already we had identified design issues that we will fix for the big droids. The frame was a little difficult and stubborn, mostly because of how warped pieces of the styrene are (that's the downside of using 25 year-old styrene I guess). But with lots of glue and a little bit of brute force, the pieces are straight enough to use. Next up is putting together P.39's neck and bearing surface so that he can turn his head once we get the electronics in him. The front piece of his 'skin' is also under construction.

.39 Series

To start off on our little droid-building escapade, we've decided to build .39 scale robots. We've done this for a few reasons,

1. the cost of materials is lower, especially since we already had a few sheets of styrene that have been in storage for about 25 years
2. it allows us to prototype frame pieces and troubleshoot issues before we build the full size droids
3. it takes up a whole lot less space

Each of us are building our own robot, Dad's building an R2 unit he's calling R2-P.39, with the standard R2 features, dome, projector, etc. And I'm building an R5 unit based off of the imperial R5-J2, I'm calling him R5-J2.39. This is gonna be fun!