Date: January 31 , 2007
Total hours spent today: 9

An awesome day today. Great way to put an end to January. Granted, I actually thought I would/could be finished by this time. Shows how lame-brained I can be at times. I'm still quite stunned at just how much work there actually is to go in to one of these little guys.

Today was another day when I was all over the place, so I'll skip putting the pictures in chronological order, and just order them thematically.

I decided to wrap up the styrene power coupler housings that I was fabricating earlier in the month. I made one as a prototype, and it turned out perfectly, so I finished up the second one today using the same methodology. I ended up adding some extra support struts to the second one, and went back and put them on the first. Though not pictured, I also had a chance to primer both of these housings tonight. They will be painted silver tomorrow.

The pieces seen below are also for the power couplers, but they need to be painted blue. These pieces were CNC cut directly from R2 builders club blue prints on the CNC machine in the shop I work in. Totally cool. They needed a tiny bit of sanding for clean up, but otherwise are totally perfect.

I did a bunch of work on the skirt today also. Most of the sanding and putty nonsense was taken care of yesterday. The first thing I needed to do was make sure that the skirt sat flush on the bottom of R2. It was really darn close, and only required a couple of passes with my orbital sander to get it to sit flat and flush. Totally nice.

Though I would usually want to spend another day on the skirt, getting it abso-perfect, I need to move on. I need to get better at not making sure EVERY piece is ABSOLUTELY perfect. It's one of those things about me that makes projects sometimes linger on for years. Sometimes, they don't even get finished at all because of it. But I'm trying really hard to be practical. I mean, come on. Who is going to notice pin holes on the underside of R2's skirt?? Honestly. I hit the skirt with a coat of grey primer first. Two reasons. First, when I primer with white, it's hard to make sure I'm getting everything covered. With a grey base coat, I'll know if I missed a spot. Second, grey tends to bring out the imperfections. White does not. Though there was nothing worth going back for, it's still interesting to see what kinds of imperfections were overlooked.

Zapped it with a couple of coats of white primer, and it's done. Well, ready for painting done.

But enough about the skirt, lets talk about the dome!! LOTS of progress has been made on R2's lid over the past few days. I have finshed up the piece that I am now referring to as "the skull". That's the "inner dome" for the uninitiated. Because the skull is finished, I was able to remove the last couple of panels from the outer dome. The two circular ones on top are out. The next step for this thing is to polish it back up, and clear coat it.

The only thing I need to do to the skull before it's ready to install is get the holo-eye mounted. Or at least, get the mountings in place for it. I started this process by first getting the skull perfectly centered inside the dome. I drilled a hole at the top of the skull so that I can lock it in place while I'm getting work done. Now the trick here is repeatability. I want to be able to get the skull back into the exact same position every time. To facilitate this, I took a sharpie and traced the outline of the skull inside the dome, and also marked of six hash markes vertically. Oh, I numbered them too. Here's what it looks like:

And here's what it looks like from the outside. You can see that I've coated the skull with a couple of coats of grey primer. Lookin' good, R2!!

It actually took me a couple of tries to get this right. My first idea was to anchor the resin holo eye to the skull directly with a couple of threaded screws. I drilled holes in the holo eye and tapped them. Then I drilled a couple of holes in the skull, but found that I had accidentally cut the opening for the holo-eye too large, meaning that this was not going to work. I switched gears and decided to use the screws like clamps to hold the holo eye in place. I think ultimately this proved to be a better solution, as the position of the eye is adjustable. If it needs to be half a millimeter higher, I can make that happen.

Here's what it looks like from the oustide. Each of the holes for the small screws was countersunk, so that the skull will still fit snugly inside the dome. I did this all with a cordless drill, as using a drill press would not allow me to get the screws in at the angle I want.

And here's the final product. Though my finger is holding the wedge plate in place, the eye is firmly attached to the skull.

My skull turned out to be slightly too big for the opening I had made in the inner dome bottom, so I had to expand it. Interesting lesson learned while attempting to do this. I tried all manner of tools to make this go fast. Dremel with a couple different types of cutting wheels, hack saw, even tried to load it onto the band saw. But the best tool for this job was a good old fashioned coping saw. Cut through it like butter. Had the whole job done in about five minutes. That was after spending about an hour dorking around with the aforementioned tools. You can also see where I've drilled holes in the inner dome for the holo eyes that go there. I'll be using the same methodology that I used on the skull.

So a pretty huge day. LOTS accomplished, and I'm feeling really good about the progress on the dome. Still a number of little issues to deal with on the dome, many of which I'm not sure how to handle.