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Date: June 30, 2007
Today was a productive day, though I'm on deaths door! I'm actually really quite sick at the moment. I've got some really nasty flu that makes me feel like I have been run over by a truck. So today I pretty much just lounged around the house, trying to give my corpse a chance to recover. Ocassionaly, I'd walk over the my desk to do some work, or down to the garage. So while I did get a bunch done today, it was very slow going. My time estimate for today's work was based on tasks spread out over the entire day.
With so much work going into painting pieces, I thought it would be a nice change to do something non paint related. After doing a little spring cleaning in the garage, I got to work on the dome. My task for today was to make sure all of the dome pieces that will be painted blue fit properly into their slots. With all the handling, moving, boxing up, etc that has happened to these pieces, it should come as no surprise to learn that some of them have lost a bit of their original shape. With something like a dome shape that is nothing but compound curves, it's important to make sure each piece fits as closely as possible. So for each piece, I would bend or tweak where necessary. Here's a picture with all of the pie wedge pieces properly tweaked.
I finished up all the dome pieces, and the next task is to primer them white and get them all cleaned up and ready for hypo-blue.
After all my complaining recently about doing nothing but painting, it was a relief to find some filing work that needed to be done. When I first got my dome, the smallest cut at the very top of the dome had not been completed. I guess the laser konked out or something. Not sure. So today I had to manually fashion the tiny button that sits at the very top of R2's dome. Turned out great.
Yesterday I mentioned that I noticed a little lip on the tool arms that I didn't like, and wanted removed. Well, whilst in the garage, I pulled out one of my metal files and took them down. only took about five minutes, and they turned out great.
Since I've already shown a million pictures of primering and painting, I'll skip the ones of the tool arms being finished up. The good news is that the tool arms are now ready for hypo-blue.
By the afternoon, I was feeling REALLY REALLY sick, and just wanted to take it easy. I found a task I could work on at my desk, which was making a gel for the rear PSI's. I used my trusty digital micrometer to map out the exact size and spacing of all the holes, then just drew it up using adobe Illustrator. I printed it out on transparency paper. The trick I found to getting good color saturation is to print out two copies, and then stack them on top of each other. No matter how I tweaked the colors in my file, they were not printing out how I wanted them. But print two, and the colors look nice and rich.
I put together a little youtube video of the PSI's in action with the new gel over them. The camera didn't really pick up the colors very well, but you get the idea.
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