Single Printed Strut
You know, I think I did make a dumb move by starting everything regarding painting, glueing etc basically all of the things that would be done with no problems in the summer, I reckon I made a daft move doing it in the Autumn/ Winter time…
my main problem is that I am impatient and that is obvious in some parts. The one advice I will happily give any new builder reading this is “ Patience… young padawan….”
This month was a leg month! No I don’t mean I spent the month in the gym..! That’s funny, but no I pretty much finished one leg and I’m pretty happy with it, there are obviously parts I wish I did better for example with the 3D printed parts,
I do wish that I had edited them sooner! The leg strut provided by the fantastic Michael Baddley, I 3D printed in the split two parts that it comes in, whilst that is good it is also a problem for me because the seam line is obvious and no matter
what I tried, I couldn’t get the seam lines to vanish without ruining the strut, so I had to leave them.
It was only when I went to print the other one I decided to actually have a go and sorting this problem out without bothering Michael, he’s a busy man I’m sure! So I went into MeshMixer, and I was actually able to merge the two together as one
solid single print piece. The results were fantastic. I did print with brim and supports as it had the two legs that it stands on and I didn’t feel they are suitable enough on their own.
My Shirt!
As an early Christmas present for myself I ordered myself my official R2 Builders T-Shirt - Thank you, Giles!! And it fits first time! I’m a really awkward size so this fitting first time was fantastic!
Painting The Legs
Got pretty much all of his leg and parts for the horse shoes printed. I did make the mistake of jumping the gun and glueing them all to the leg without priming or painting them first which looking back on it was an amateur mistake to make and I
certainly didn’t make that mistake on the second leg! One thing I did have an issue with was there is a little “ring” that isn’t really a ring, it goes at the bottom of the leg before it bulges out a bit, I’ll show you with a picture! There is a
ring type of thing that goes on here and basically with it being for a CS:R droid, it didn’t fit my legs, I did try to edit the scale of it but that didn’t really work sadly so essentially what I did was print it out, and cut out the back part of
it and wrap it round as much as I could. I may stick them back on and just fill the gaps but for now I suppose it makes R2 look like he’s been part of something, oh I don’t know, maybe two galaxy wide wars and finally got something broken off?
Painting wise, I was so impressed with the Wilko’s own brand paints that were nice and cheap but delivered fantastic results I went back for more.
Well, after the rain stopped anyway. I finally as able to get his leg sprayed and even had a go at masking off parts. During this month, I had a last
minute thing come up, a story that really broke my heart, a local family had a house fire, I didn’t know the family at all and probably never would
have if I hadn’t had seen this story but sadly they lost their 7 year old daughter in the fire. As a musician I rallied together and left myself
a week and a half to organize a charity event to help the family out who had quite literally lost everything, more than everything.
21st December local bands came together from all different genres and played one hell of a show raising £400.00 for this family.
Bear in mind that this is right on the door step to Christmas, right before pay day as well so as great as that one, I didn’t leave a lot of time
for R2 building but the reward of seeing the families face was worth it!
Keep The Electronics Neat!
Another plus, I finally got some lovely motors from eBay. Some 24VDC 120W motors, as a pair for about £20.00 odd. Plugged them in first time, and they worked, just got to finally work on the drive chassis! Other electronics related
notes are I completely dismantled the chopping board and re-wired everything because I didn’t like the long messy wires and that really turned out looking nice!
On top of all that, spent the entire Christmas and New Years period working on R2, no time for slacking!