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