Date: June 29, 2007
Total hours spent today: 3

Another nice day of tooling around on the balcony with R2 parts and some rattle cans.

I did another coat of primer on the tool arms today. Just when I thought they were finished, I noticed that theres a ridge on the tip of the tool arms that doesn't belong there. It's part of the aluminum piece. Don't know if it's just a machining artifact, or whatever, but it's got to go. So tomorrow I'll get the metal files out and bang it down. Should only take five minutes, but I'll need to spend some time fixing up the primer once that is done. No big deal. Were this any other part, I probably wouldn't worry about it, but the tool arms are sort of "in yo face" on the dude, and I want them to look good.

I DID finish up the primer on the booster covers. As far as I'm concerned, these are ready for blue paint. Speaking of which, I spoke to "Angel" today at the paint place. One of the colors of Hypo-Blue needs to be special ordered, so it will be another five or six business days before it comes in. So no rush. But yeah, the booster covers are done. Well, primered.

Similar to the booster covers, these little ankle cylinder thingies are also primered and ready for painting. I still need to figure out if these are white or blue. I'd better run over to astromech.net to check that out.

After my fairly unsuccessful attempts at getting a good clear coat on some other aluminum parts, I figured I'd try something new for the pocket vents, which also needed a clear coat. But before that, I had to figure something out. I wasn't sure if the pocket itself is painted blue inside or if it's just aluminum. From looking at the different reference available, it looks like it varied from droid to droid. I'm going to leave it naked metal, and if I one day decide I want the pocket blue, I'll deal with it later. Consider this a corner I'm cutting to get him finished. So the trick to getting a good clear coat was raising the pieces up! Previously, I was spraying pieces that were resting on rattle can caps, or a piece of wood or something. But basically, they were just a couple of inches off the ground. So when I would spray from the can, a lot of dust and debris was kicked up, which could ultimately settle on the still wet clear coat. Thus giving folks like Wamser a chance to take a pot shot at me :) but I've got it licked now. I brought a stool up from the garage, put a piece of cardboard on top of it, and painted the pieces there. No dust from the ground! The clear coat on the pocket vents turned out beautifully, and I'm very happy with them.

This is the plate on R2's torso that goes around the two main vents. It will be blue eventually. I primered it with a coat of the etching grey, then a coat or two of white. I sanded the bumps down after the white, and then hit it with a beauty coat to finish it up. This piece is ready for blue paint.

So that's it for today. Again, just another day of painting and stuff. Not really a lot of engineering or thinking going on at this point, just going through the motions of getting parts ready for painting. Definitely making progress though, and that's what counts.