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Date: Jan 9, 2007
Today was another huge building day. Got lots of little things taken care of today. On with the show.
First up are some ankle details. I don't know the name for these things, but there are four of them. I drilled and tapped them all so that they can now be attached to the ankles
Speaking of ankles, here's what they look like with the thingies attached:
I also did some putty work on the miserable resin castings of the ankle wedges. Cleaned them up enough, primered them, and test fitted them into place. In the final assembly, I think I'm just going to glue these in place. Too much of a hassle to screwe them on. The angles are very weird.
I drilled out the holes on the batteries so that the hose couplings would fit properly. They were to small originaly.
Finished puttying, sanding, and primered the coin slots:
Did some work on the main eye. I'm going to end up making this so that it fits flush with the dome. This looks like it's lost some meat in a generation, and that will need to be rebuilt. This is another one of the awful resin castings that came with my kit. I've already sunk a couple of hours into cleaning it up. It's getting there:
Though this didn't really take any work on my behalf, I took a picture of all the paints I've assembled for R2. You're looking at just under 500 bucks of paint here.
I finished painting a few of the ports today. I also realized that I'm missing one of the hex ports.
My favorite part about todays build was putting R2's skins on. It was actually an enormous pain in the butt. I had to drill a ton of little holes through the skins and into the frame. The frame is really only about twice as wide as the drill hole, so it took a lot of patience. I finally settled on a technique that involved using a nail and hammer to mark a pilot hole. I was able to line up the nail to the frame much more easily than the wandering drill bit. So the first few holes aren't so good, but the rest are dead on the money. Broke my first tap doing this too. ouch! Here's a couple of pics of the attached skins. I still need to coutner sink all of the screw holes. That's on the docket for tomorrow.
More miserably cast resin pieces that need cleaning. I don't know if it was shrinkage, or just mis-drilled holes, but the tool arms do not properly deploy through the skins when put into place. So I've sealed up the original drill holes, and started claning up the castings. Way too much work to be done here, but I want these to look good.
That's it for today. A really good day. He's really starting to come together. Oh, forgot to mention that my idea for the vacu former didn't quite pan out. Back to the drawing board on that one. At this point, it looks like I'm going to go witht he expanding foam solution for the inner dome until something better comes along.
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