Wheee!

Perhaps that should be "wee" -- as in: I got a wee bit of droid work done Friday! Very wee. Behold: the single drop of red nail polish dolloped onto the side of motor to indicate where to run the positive wire. Because, when mounted to spin the dome, this motor's terminals will be underneath and difficult to see. Yep! That's all I got done!

(Although I did do a fair amount of reading/researching as I'm beginning to get near the electronics installation and wish to be prepared.)

Dizzy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bleary, Achey...Oh Wait -- Droids Not Dwarves!

Two days of building will be covered in today's post, PLUS a bonus pic from the Cosplay Symposium here in Austin that the Central Texas Droid Builders members attended. Below see Dizzy and Jamie McShan's awesome R2! This event was actually a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to post about it I think. :-)

So, a couple of days of building to cover...I'll try to remember everything! I actually started by filing the bolt holes in the body so they'd be a little wider. Forgot to take a picture! Ah well, I'm not done with that yet anyway.

Next I used a template to drill holes for the bolts that will attach my center leg to the body. I may go get shorter bolts as these seem like overkill haha! 

I snipped off the ends of some nylon bolts I'm planning to use to attach all the leg "bits" to the legs. Some parts will be glued on, but some seemed a bit on the heavy side so I wanted the option of reinforcing the join this way.

Test-fitting the placement of the "bits" and deciding how to proceed (that last part is not pictured haha).

Quite a few of the resin pieces needed a bit of trimming:

Inserting the bolts that will attach the legs (via the shoulder hubs) to the body:

And now we're caught up to today! First I painted a couple of pieces that I'd missed. No pics of that!

Then I began screwing bits on. You can also see the little cuts on the bracelets that enabled me to pop them on without removing the ankles. I fixed those cuts but didn't take a pic of that.

Screwing on the horseshoes. 

Test-fitting all the parts that attach to the ankle. I decided not to affix these until I get the feet.

But I went ahead and prepped the heavier parts with a nylon bolt.

I'd never permanently attached the ankles to the legs so I did that now, using screws on the sides. I then Dremeled out a little dimple on the part that will cover each screw. So clever of me! :-)

Gluing those side parts on.

Affixing the cylinders to the center ankle.

 Drilled holes in the battery boxes for the hoses. 

I also did more weathering here and there, whenever I was waiting for glue to set up. 

Yesterday I spent about 3 hours and today about 7 hours (!). The legs are PRETTY MUCH DONE!! I'm pretty excited about that, eh? Wow...Dizzy should be up and running this year as hoped!! 

Distressed Droid is Distressing

Look at that! LOOK AT IT! The center ankle is now attached to the center foot shell! And the distressing/weathering has commenced! Good thing too, because...

I had to utilized a grrrrrrrreat deal of force to get the 3/8" bolts through the 3/8" holes, and I CRACKED the foot shell! Luckily this is not a structural piece, and the crack isn't that big. Whew. 

Next up was sanding off all that cake frosting Bondo I'd applied yesterday. Look what I found in the utility room: a power sander! Woooo! I didn't even know we had one! Wow did this make the job MUCH easier!

However it was indeed a messy process. And it still took about 3 hours. And my arm still feels jiggly from the vibrations of the sander. But I got it pretty darn smoooooth!

After washing off all the dust, it was time to apply primer. It's about 104 degrees out, so maybe not such a good idea. Many weirdnesses happened at this stage. But I sanded a little more and went on!

After the first coat of paint there were still issues, but I pressed on. With every layer the legs began to look a little better. There are still odd spots here and there. But *sigh* that's what distressing is for!

All told I spent about 4 1/2 hours today. Plus this quick little bloggy!

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! 

A Few Little Droid Bits

After yesterday's marathon I only got a few things done today. Among them though was noting a couple of mistakes from the past few days: if you've studied the pics you'll have seen a piece of styrene I drilled out as additional support being test fit on the center ankle. On the BOTTOM.  Oooops! I did not need to re-drill holes in the frame base because the bolts that came installed on my center ankle are on the bottom! D'oh! I also bought the wrong M3 screws for attaching the motors to the motor mounts. Even though Teeces handily provided a chart of hardware needed for styrene droids, and even though I WROTE DOWN M3 12mm -- for some crazy reason I bought 30mm...and no way will those work! Ah well!!

Final mistake: I never ordered a beefy ankle set. Those used to be available from Keith, but he's not currently pouring resin parts. Bah! What to do? Well, I decided to yank off the ankles I'd attached (which I would have needed to bolt on anyway) and order Calvin and Brenda's nice new resin outer ankles that INCLUDE the beefy parts! I hate undoing work, but nobody else is providing the beefy ankles right now.

Ankles yanked, I put aside the legs to wait for my outer ankle order. I proceeded to doing some of the fine detail painting on the leg parts. Most of it I decided to do by hand:

I did mask off the cylinders though...

Aaaaand with that I have to take at least a week off to wait for parts and take care of real-life business. See y'all soon!

What Six Hours Will Get Ya

Yep, you read that right: I spent six hours working on Dizzy today. You are about to see how much little one can accomplish in that amount of time!

First I must say that every building session involves a bit of housekeeping. It might be tidying up the area, gathering tools/paint/hardware/parts, it might be a tiny bit of research/reading, and it might be making a list of what one wishes to accomplish on that day. Usually it's all of that. During the session there is often sweeping-up, clearing out bits of trash/droid-waste, uploading pics for the blog...you get the picture! Often one is test-fitting, adjusting, test-fitting again, and then perhaps actual gluing or bolting or whatever. So very glamorous, I'll tell you!

Today included all of the above...over and over and over and...

So, here was today's droid to-do list:

I began by sorting out all the hardware I'd bought yesterday into carefully marked baggies:

 Test-fitting the nuts I'd bought for the center ankle. I'd stupidly painted the threads, but luckily got the nuts all the way on!

Next I started enlarging the holes to attach the shoulder hub to the frame. The force knocked one of the supports right out! It was fine though, as I realized the holes not only needed to be larger -- they needed to be in a different configuration!

So I started on that piece I'd knocked loose. Here you can see the original small holes alongside my pencil marks for the new holes:

Pencil marks on the frame part that did not pop out:

And to prevent pop-out on the other side I clamp the area tightly:

Glueing the hub sections together and test fitting the bolts: 

Test-fitting on the frame. None of the holes lined up perfectly so this was a VERY LONG PROCESS involving boring out the holes and skin area with the two files in the picture. 

Before final test-fit I apply the silver tape. This looks rotten. I no longer care. This is about 4 hours into the build. At this point I'm tired and cranky and silently cursing those with the ability to make perfect droids. Okay not really. But...I wonder how that is even possible!!? *sigh* Then I tell myself: at least I'm making a droid -- even if he's messy. How many people do this? Not too many, Liz!

I had to hammer the last bolt in, but one hub is on!!!! O.M.G. Yes, I danced a little.

On the other side I see a half inch gap. This side has always had weird gap issues. I don't want to think about what that could mean -- I know I made a mistake somewhere long ago -- so I figure I'll deal with future, um, leg issues down the road. :-(

Avert your eyes if you don't want to see a droid-bottom...

I flip him over and begin marking to install his skirt!

Something smart I did (yay!) : drilled, inserted bolts through the skirt into the frame, then taped them in place so I could put the nuts on later when he's right side up.

As feared, my resin ankle bolts are configured differently than the styrene one would have had. So, time to drill fresh holes. Those are unnervingly close to the old holes. 

So I prepare an extra layer of styrene support that I'll glue in later. Here it is being test-fitted on the center ankle.

I flipped Dizzy upright and secured his skirt. WoooOOOOooooOOOOOooo it's dark inside a droid!

Not pictured: gluing in his large data port. Also not pictured: knocking one of the FLD wires loose while trying on the dome. Still. STILL!! Look at him! So near done!! Squeeeeeee!

Cleaned up a bit, then thought of one last little thing I could do -- pin-striping the horseshoes: 

Aaaaaaaand I'm calling it a day! Whew! Now how much on my list did I actually get done? Hmmmmm. About half. Which is typical. I did add a couple of things and remove one thing. And so it goes! THUD.