Meltification

No, I guess that's not really a word. But it seems to describe well how styrene behaves when it gets quite warm. As in when the friction of a power tool is applied to it for any length of time.

I'd forgotten the days of melty plastic all over my expensive router bit back when I was cutting the frame...but oh how I was reminded yesterday afternoon!

Ah -- I seem to have gotten ahead of myself; let's begin at the beginning then!

The day began with a lengthy visit to the hardware store. My hardware store has the amusing moniker "Zinger." Difficult to forget! Yet, like all hardware stores it is like a siren to droid-builders: we are called inside, and time seems to vanish in that place, and without the watchful companionship of my husband I worry I'd be there still! Hunting, hunting for that perfect fastener...

Anyhoo, here's the day's haul:

If I've planned everything correctly there should be only one or two more visits for hardware before this little droid is done!

For the first building project of the day I resumed work on my FrankenHubs. Half-inch holes needed to be drilled through the circle pieces I glued together yesterday. This styrene is lovely tough stuff, and using a spade bit to drill by hand took a while -- long enough for...meltification!! Note the styrene "goo" that forms around (and inside) those holes as a result of the heat:

I decided to break out the old drill press, hoping the process would be faster and result in less melting.

Nope.

Using the drill press resulted in exactly the same amount of meltification, and oddly, was taking much longer in the set-up process. Also do note the clump of melted styrene clinging to the tip of my bit. That had to be scraped off every single time!! So, back to hand-drilling I went.

How I clamped the pieces (here I was also drilling out the 5/16 holes):

And how melty they always looked when done. I see much filing in my future! And clean-up of styrene  "goo." :-(

Since I had the spade bit on, I went ahead and also drilled the half-inch holes for the motor-mount pieces:

Now all this was actually much more work than it would appear in this short blog post; I ended up feeling quite tired -- and when one gets tired, one should put the power tools AWAY!  And  that is what I did! 

More SOOOOON!