Well, Labor Day Weekend is upon us here in the States, and I have big plans for the weekend. I will be skinning my frame, and (hopefully) drilling the holes for the pipes that support the legs. My goal is to have a carcass by Monday!

That said, I needed to get the frame ready. The less I have to do to it once the skins are glued on, the better. That meant getting the 3/4-inch plywood side rails installed to hold up the pipes. As you can see here, the frame is all ready to go. Look closer, though, and you will see two things. First, the second main ring down from the top was going to interfere with the shoulder hub, so I had to do some surgery to excavate a gap for the shoulder to hub to fit into. Second, the 3/4-inch plywood side rails were 3/8 of an inch too short, so I have to literally shave off a layer or two of plywood and glue it all up. Thank goodness for Gorilla Glue.

Then, it was back to my youthful days. Remember how much fun you had building that model kit of the Dagobah swamp? Well, I'm back to building models, complete with the smell of toluene in the air. You probably couldn't tell from the earlier pix, but the skins I bought from Andy Schwartz came with "extras" - little bits and pieces that were cut into the scrap styrene. Well, it turns out that these extras can be assembled like a model kit into various parts of the astromech body.

Thanks to Alex Kung's awesome tutorials, I've been putting my extras together. I already had resin castings of the power couplings and the front and side vents, but there were still other goodies to build. I've gotten started on the octagonal ports and the plugs that go inside them, the two center vents, and the "coin returns". These are those rectangular ports along the bottom that look like a chute that coins fall down from out of vending machines. In the image above you will see one in between the side vent (and the lower left of R2's body) and the power coupling (in the lower middle of R2's body, just below the two center vents). These take some time to get all glued together, so I'll have some completed pictures shortly.

Of course, all of this stuff has to be painted as well. That, my friends, will be a story worth telling... at a later time.

Bob
August 31, 2007