Date: August 1, 2007
Total hours spent today: 6

WILDLY productive day today! I'm super jazzed over how much great stuff I got accomplished today. The main thing I knocked out today was laying down my first "Hypo Blue", and man, did it turn out great. Read on, true believer.

But let's back up a bit, shall we?? I sat around thinking a lot about the best way to do this hypo blue application. The pieces that I'm going to paint are pretty small, and it occurred to me that using the spray gun might be overkill. I mean, that thing ships a lot of paint pretty quickly. So I decided to give it a try using an airbrush. My Hollywood pro friends scoffed at the idea when I first presented it, as I was originally going to attempt the entire project with just a tiny airbrush. Of course, they were right. It would have been nuts. But for the smaller pieces, I got to thinking that it would be best.

But now I needed to hook my airbrush up to my air compressor. I wasn't about to drop 200 bucks on a desktop "whisper mode" air compressor for an airbrush. I figure compressed air is compressed air. Right? Right. Bummer is, my airbrush didn't have the right connector to go into my compressor. So I dragged the little lady with me down to Droid Depot to find an adaptor. Now that I'm familiar with all things air compressor related, it was a snap to find. Here's the results.

And just for the record, I am using and ULTRA ghetto air brush. I LITERALLY got this for six bucks at the Orange County swap meet. It was at one of those horrific "tool" booths. Yikes! I got it thinking it would be good to have around JUST IN CASE, but didn't think it would actually be any good. Over the years, I've owned a few airbrushes. And I paid a pretty penny for them too. Usually more than a hundred bucks. So this little thing was a risk, but I figured I'd give it a chance. Long story short, it worked like a frickin' CHAMP. I am amazed at the good work it did. But read on to see the results.

My plan was to test the hypo blue on these panels. These are the plates that go behind the pocket vents and the side vents. The ones with the holes in them are for the pocket vents.

I headed down to the garage and mixed up a few containers of the blue "candy" coat. Its just a 1:1 mix between the paint and reducer. I filled up about five of those little mixing bottles I've come to know and love. Speaking of love, I love them even more, now that I found out you can screw those bottles directly onto the airbrush. Woohoo!!! I also mixed up two more containers of white, just to finish off the remaining pieces.

So the first step in laying down the Hypo Blue is to paint the base coat. This is the stuff I mixed up yesterday. It went down REALLY nicely. Though my plan was to only paint those four pieces, I grabbed a few extras when I noticed I wasn't going to use all the paint I had on hand. It's hard to tell from the photos, but it went down just beatifully. I made a few goof ups along the way, but that was kind of expected. I'm using these little plates as "learning" plates. Here's the result of three coats of purple:

And the cylinders painted purple too:

While the base coat was drying, I ran down to the garage to do some other work. One thing that was bugging me for a long time was the center ankle. The bracket that it sits on is about .04" too narrow. So when you bolt the ankle in place, it compresses it. I've been compensating for this by putting washers on the inside of the ankle (between the ankle and the bracket), but this was only a temporary measure. So today, I came up with a more permanent solution. I found a piece of aluminum that used to be a panel on the outer skins. I used my coping saw to cut it to size. I drilled a couple of holes using my drill press, and glued it into place. I slid it onto the bracket while the glue dried, just to make sure everything was going to set perfectly in place. I also put the skirt on just for the picture. It's not attached.

So now comes the miracle. I went back and sprayed on a thick coat of the candy blue. WOW! The things just pop with color!!! I'm ASTOUNDED at how amazing the blue looks. Personally, having never seen a real R2 in person, I cannot say if the color matches perfectly. But *I* am VERY pleased with it. I think it looks beautiful, and I'm really proud of how good it came out. The pictures do not do it justice.

Here's the cylinders with the masking removed. I'm going to clear coat the entire cylinder, so it was safe to remove the masking.

Before applying a clear coat, I thought it was a good idea to give everything a chance to fully dry, so I took this opportunity to enjoy the 80+ degree weather we're having here in Sunny Southern California. This meant heading down to the pool and lounging for an hour while listening to the latest Smodcast on my iPod.

But enough of the fun and games, time to run some clear coat!!!

Again, I decided to use the airbrush, as I thought the spray gun would be overkill. I decided to hold off on doing the cylinders, as they require a bit of clean up, and I'm going to have to figure out a way to hold them so that I can clear coat the entire thing in one sitting. Should be interesting.

But enough of the preamble. Without further adoo (adieu??), here are the final pieces. Painted and clear coated.

Like before, I set up some extra pieces in case I had some clear coat left over. I did, and they turned out great!!!

I should emphasize that these pictures REALLY do not do these pieces justice. I'm SOO stoked at how good these turned out, even though they're not totally perfect. Yup, the old dust problem again. But what are you going to do? Better yet, what am *I* going to do?? So I'll just take it as it comes. Now I need to wait 24 hours before I can install the panels on the back sides of the vents.

On a closing note, I'll throw out my first offical PSA. Mentioned earlier were my Hollywood pals. One of the tips they gave me was to store my respirator in a plastic bag when not in use. I guess this keeps the filters dormant. If it's just sitting on a shelf, air will be passing through them, and they only have a limited life span. I'm told that you should expect about 40 hours out of a set of filters. Your mileage may vary. Read the damn instructions!!!!

And now a quick plug for a product. I picked up a bunch of these little mixing containers at my auto paints store, and they're just great! I actually mixed the clear coat INSIDE one of them today. It has measurement marks on the side, so you can mix up as little or as much as you need. Super cool. And they're dirt cheap too (I think I paid 40 cents a piece) which means I can just chuck them out instead of spending 20 minutes cleaning each one. NICE!

So that's all for today folks. Great day over here at ROCS. I'm really happy. Things are really looking good at the moment. There's a VERY real chance I may indeed get all of the painting AND clear coating finished by friday, but I don't want to get overly optimistic. If I hurry too much, I'll just end up making mistakes.

Thanks again for reading. See you tomorrow!!