Bith's Droid: 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: