Monday, August 5, 2013

You must undo what you have done...

Yes, that was a Yoda-ish reference. And descriptive of my droid-building method, which seems to be: one step forward, two steps back!

Anyway I'd mentioned last time that I was waiting on my new ankles. Well they are here, they are gorgeous, and they don't quite work with the A&A legs. More dismantling needed to be done, and cutting of scrap so they/d fit right.



I also trimmed up the outer leg skins, although I was unsure if I'd be using them or going with the Bondo method.


Test-fitting:


Aaaaaand I discovered there were many small issues, again, derived from mixing and matching droid stuff. This time it's the A&A legs with the styrene skins from Dave E's plans. Those center holes would not have worked, and holes needed to be drilled for access to the leg bolts, and much trimming and Bondo-ing was looking likely. I decided to ditch the skins and just Bondo. It meant losing that nice little gap on the skins, but some ILM droids don't have that anyway!

So off went all the skins I'd affixed - the leg on the right is all stripped down:


Taking a little bit of time to re-tape off the ankle cylinders as I'd painted one of them with the wrong color.


Test fitting the placement of one of the lovely new ankles. It turned out I needed to shorten the legs by about an inch and a half. That was fun. :-(


In preparation for the upcoming paint job on the legs I decided to remove the ankle bracelets, and, by cutting a small slot in them, make them easy to slip on and off with the ankle still affixed in the future. I just didn't want to have to tape them off during painting. Yeah. 


Finally, it's Bondo-time! Man is this stuff smelly. It looks like pink frosting on there. Hopefully it will sand up nicely because it's pretty bad looking right now.


All that took about 4 1/2 hours. Uploading pics and writing usually adds another 45 minutes. I wish I'd logged how much time I've spent on each step! 


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