Sunday, July 10, 2011

Body of Evidence

Yesh it's getting harder to come up with blog entry titles!

Anyhoo, two days' worth of building to cover, so let's get to it! I began yesterday by removing the frisket from the coin slots part. This didn't come out as nicely as my other frisketting. I was pondering hand-painting the wee slots, when my eyes fell upon my jars of colored pencils. You may have seen them in the background of some earlier photos -- but I've got something like 350+ colored pencils! Oddly the pencil that stood out was an exact match for my school bus yellow paint, so I thought I'd give it a try...and whaddaya know? It worked perfectly! A little clear coat and nobody will be the wiser. Except y'all of course.



Here I'm gluing the internals into the center vent surrounds. This is a view from the back:



I decided to get the magnet glued onto my restraining bolt; I'm not sure if I'm going to use one, but you never know!



Some more weathering, then clear coat, and here we are!



I went ahead and got those coin slots in using silicone. I also tried silicone on the coin returns, which are made of styrene, not resin. This turned out to be a problem...



Trying silicone out on the side vents (styrene) too:



And the lower vents...and I think you can see the problem. It's just too thick, and styrene wants Weld-On, which essentially melts pieces solidly together.



I decided I'd redo them all...tomorrow!
Which is today.
So let's resume!

One of the lower vents was blocked by a frame upright piece. This is due to some incomprehensible mistake I made early on...I've yet to figure out how I messed up, but it has had consequences ever since.

Anyway it needed trimming so the piece could fit so I marked it and got out my Dremel.



A bit of wiggling and the section popped out nicely, and I hope the frame is no worse for the wear...



Vent installation went well:



For the rear coin returns, again due to the frame uprights being offset a bit, I had to do some trimming to get them installed.



I saved the worst of the frame offset problem pictures for last. Here the side vent has an entire 1/2 inch of extra space! I'm pretty sure I can fix it to look okay using some scrap styrene and an acetone slurry, but...I worry about how this happened, and what it might mean for the leg installation later. Hmmm, guess I'll climb that hill when I finally get there! But this is just plain UGLY:



Anyway, the styrene parts installed, it was back to getting the resin parts put in. In a few places the inner skin was protruding so I trimmed it back:



Much better!



I could have prepared these octagon ports in advance, but I didn't. Doing it now was actually good as I could trim to fit and test right away!



And when I couldn't get everything perfect, weathering filled little gaps. This method is not recommended for building all droids of course, just mine! ;-)



Here I'm preparing little support pieces of styrene for other resin parts.



Ready to hold up the lower front vent:



Here they are both installed...took a bit of finessing with styrene supports.



A rare shot of the inside. Due to the thickness of the frame rings, some of these parts were rather challenging to set.



These ports had frames and I needed to do some trimming/paint removal before finishing them up:



Dremel to the rescue! They fit perfectly. Unfortunately...see the one on the left? How it's not aligned properly? I didn't notice that until it was installed on the droid. Luckily it's on the lower backside, but still... :-(



Okay! All the main parts (except the utility arms and large data port, which go up top there) are installed on the body! Wooooo! I also started weathering the skins. Here's the front view:



Front/side view:



Side view:



Back view:



Test-fitting the LDP and arms:



Wow! I can't believe how great he's starting to look! Well to me he's beautiful... :-)

Friday, July 8, 2011

Talkin' 'Bout the Weather

I was hoping to have all the body parts installed by the end of today, but alas: all things droid take TWICE as long as one plans!!

Anyway, here is a better (somewhat) shot of the weathering I did on parts yesterday. I really went to town with weathering today...but first I needed to finish a few parts.



I believe I forgot to mention that these odd flat things I've been working on are called "A&A skin extras." I ordered them because, I'll be honest, I was tired of cutting styrene. They were still a lot of work, so don't think I started being a slacker or anything.

Anyway, I thought I'd finish the gluing of these parts by noon today. Wrong. Half the time they were glued to my own fingers. Or the squares I was trying to use to make sure they were nicely perpendicular.





Aaaaand multiply the above by about 80 and you have most of my day. Once those side parts were dry I was supposed to wrangle them into these adorable slots:



Here I am wrangling them. And getting more glue all over my fingertips.



Today I decided to get a picture of Krazy Glue+fingertip Action:



Pretty, no? Anyway, I plugged along and the parts came together:



I'm glad I prepainted. That saves me masking all those bits off, at least.



Hooray! Almost halfway done!! *quiet sobs*



Starting on the next set...



I'll spare you and skip ahead; suffice to say it was more of the same. Trying to true things up, long minutes with 1/2-glued fingers shakily holding edges down...anyway, here is the second set (and yeah, I'm jumping ahead to the weathered pics):



And the first set weathered. I loved the weathering! It was fun to smudge and spatter. I'm looking forward to doing the whole droid when I'm to that point!



I was still hoping to install all these body parts today so I started trimming the "center vent surrounds."



I did this freehand -- no line drawn out ahead of time! I'm such a wild child.



Came out perfect. Here I test fit the innards:



As happened yesterday...a bunch of photos vanished off my camera. Ugh.

The rest of the day was spent clear-coating the weathered parts, and painting the last body parts silver and yellow. Only the yellow parts pic survived. Still, it's pretty sweet!



Tomorrow, I hope, hope, HOPE to get some of these stuck on my droid's body!! For now...rest...

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Body Parts -- No, Not a New Horror Novel!

For the last few days my updates have been off by a day due to when I post; today I'll put the last few days' progress up, and that should catch us up to this morning.

First I needed to primer some of the body parts:



If you see primer or paint with this sort of mechanism AVOID IT! Both of these failed on me today...one actually flew apart!



At least I was successful at getting the first layer down, the yellow:



While the paint was drying I began assembly of the styrene flat parts I'd sorted. I began with the "coin returns." I love the names the club gave some of these parts!





(not pictured: me getting Krazy Glue all over my fingertips!)

Assembly of the center vents was a bit difficult due to little tabs being present that had no matching slots. My solution was to slice 'em off!



There we go!



I decided to paint these before assembly. Oddly, from this point on, half my photos went missing.
I sorted the bits into parts to be painted aluminum, and parts to be painted yellow. You'll have to trust me on this. XD



Before painting I took the time to mask off the now-dry yellow parts that I needed to remain yellow. Rather than use tape, I decided to try some of my old liquid frisket.



I tried two different types. The one pictured below worked the best, as it was thicker.



Testing the frisket:



That stuff will ruin your paintbrushes. Be sure to have lots of cheap paintbrushes on hand for building Artoo!



Finally it got cool enough to do a little painting:



I had several nice shots of the final frisket removal (worked like a charm), but they have vanished. So here we jump ahead to my first weathering of a part.


Aaaand some more finished parts, ready to be stuck on R2!



That brings us up-to-date! More work tomorrow... :-)