Parts

I also have been ordering parts lately and a few of them came in.

That is the battery pack and charger for my Turnigy 9x that is shipping from Hobbyking.com in China.  I don't know a lot about R/C yet, but everything I have read says the Turnigy is a good solid inexpensive radio that you can build off of.  It is a 9 channel radio so it should give me plenty of options for R2.  Hopefully it will be here next week so I can start playing with it and maybe tinkering with it.

Also something else fun showed up at my door by the big brown truck.

 It's Crash's fiberglass Gen 2 skirt.  I must say that Crash does excellent work. I was going to attempt this myself, but after getting his dome and seeing the pictures of the skirt he offered I told myself to just go on and buy his and I am glad I did.

I also got my 'Rockler' Bearing from Mcmaster-Carr at about 5-10 bucks cheaper than Rockler.

It is the same size as the rockler and the same color and shape so I figured I couldn't go wrong with saving a little money on it.

Anyway that is all for today, hopefully I will get the notches sanded and the legs glued up this weekend and I will have another update.

Legs and Parts

It has been a while since I made a post so I figured I should show that I have not been idle.

I started back to work on the legs to get them glued up and fitted to the frame.  Eddie chiseled the notches in the legs for me while I watched and made sure I didn't pass out if he went all the way through.

 

 But he didn't mess up and they came out really nice I think. 

I spent a little time on the center sections with the band saw and cut out the middle and the notches on those easily.

So the notches are finished and after some sanding to clean it up a bit they will be ready to glue up.

On another note I worked on the leg hubs while Eddie was cutting the notches in the legs.  lots of lines and drilling later and I have this as the result.

So those are good to go I went ahead and routed them down to the appropriate 6.25" they are supposed to be and everything is good to go except the hole in the middle to run the wires through but I will do that later.

More Dome Work

Last night I had a little bit of free time so I taped the dome panels I had painted and got out the rub-n-buff and got to work.

It needs a bit more work getting some of the 'bad polish' look out of it but it is definitely shinny now.

I also did a little work on the coin slots that came with the A&A skins I will post some pictures of that later.

That's all for now hopefully more will get done this weekend.

Body-Legs

Last night I didn't have very much time but I was able to put the skins on the frame and line up where the legs will attach.

Yes that is my dining room table but right now it is an R2 work bench.  It is a bit messy and I will be in trouble for showing it like that but that is how R2 looks today.

More to the point I was going to use the gas pipe method for attaching the legs, but after buying all the parts that I now get to take back, I found SteveWs method for attaching his legs via a nice template he designed which leaves all that precious space inside your droid for electronics and 6 packs of beer at the con etc etc.

Anyway that is the method I will probably go with.  I will post more on that later when I actually do it.

So again if you are reading this thank you and glad you have read my catch up posts up to this point.  But as of today, 1-15-13 this is a current blog, yay me.

Dome Paint 2

After a full week of waiting, since if you stop mid painting you have to wait an entire week before you can apply more coats, I finally got back to the shop to finish the paint on R2.


It was even colder so I had to heat the shop even longer before starting on R2, I worked on the cabinet for the bathroom that I promised my wife 4 months ago while I waited for the shop to warm up.

Having decided R2 was still a little too purple for my tastes I put one more coat of anodized blue on, which made 3 coats total, I then cleared it using Rustoleum Clear as per the Krider method.

Again because of lack of pictures you get to see only the end result.

I obviously also peeled the tape and paper off and you can see the silver needs some work yet, get rid of the over spray hit it with some rub n buff etc etc.  But I think it came out pretty good.  It is a hair darker than I would have originally hoped for but in the light it looks good.  Few minor blems on the paint job where I peeled the tape a little too soon, but I think I can fix those where its hard to tell.

All in all I am very happy.

Dome Paint

Well after a bit of foul weather and fowl weather ha ha ha, oh sorry, I got fed up and Eddie and I went to the shop fired up the heater and got to painting.

I did the modified Krider method, on my dome.  I was unable to find Rustoleum metallic purple so I had to go with Testors Purple-licous.

I might add that this stuff is PURPLE, holly cow I thought we ruined all the damned sanding and priming on some freaking purple purpleness that shot out of the can in a very big PURPLE, did I mention that it was purple?

Moving on after two light coats of purple, we sprayed on a coat of the Duplicolor anodized blue.

It really toned it down to a nice purple blue.  Deciding it was now 1 in the morning Eddie and I decided to call it a night let the paint set up and come back to it after a while.

Yeah Eddie was being very mature through the whole process, considering he was the one that actually did the painting I can't say a whole lot.

Skins

Not an important post but a, Hey I bought some cool crap over here, kind of post.

I had been playing with skin ideas, ranging from I will do my own to buy Chani's budget skins. 

After contacting Chani, and later finding out she had gotten ill, I contemplated building aluminum skins myself.  I had the plans, I can get the aluminum, cheaper than styrene I might add, but it kept nagging at me don't do it, it can only end in disapointment.

So listening to my inner wife I got a hold of R7Dude on astromech.net and picked me up a set of A&A skins.

And that's how they look, I think its pretty awesome.  They cost a bit more than say doing it myself but they are finished and I didn't mess it up by trying to cut off a limb or something.

This picture by the way they are just the inner skins temporarily attached to the frame.