And About time Too...

I have finally, after months of leaving poor Arty to sit there rusting away, got my shit together and done something.. not much but it's better than nothing.

I STILL haven't got all the red off :(, but have got more than half off, so I thought bugger it, I'll just start hacking and painting, just to see what it looks like...

And ta da, after a busy weekend with my trusty dremel, here's a few piccies of my progress.

Hopefully I'll not leave it too long before doing more, and maybe finally getting rid of that dam red paint.

I know all the hardcore R2D2 builders that see this, may have a few things to say, about not being the right colour blue, the radar eye is not right, the spraying is crap, and the circle I cut out isn't round :(, but I'm happy enough. I don't pretend to be any good at doing anything where tools are concerned, so I expect it to be a little rough, but as long as it looks ok, I'm happy :)

FLDs added and tested... looks pretty good, but doesn't show up on photo very well

without LEDS on

that circle was a bitch :( not looking foward to doing the HPs

my crap spraying is actually growing on me, it looks a bit battle damaged :)

Oooh Flashy

My cheaper attempt at building an FLD for my R2D2.

I'm trying to build my artoo as cheap as I can without spoiling it too much. so I thought rather than go for the normal 5 x 9 matrix, I would build my own 3 x 6 matrix running from the max7219 and an arduino. This way I can run both FLDs off 1 max7219.

probably not saving massive amounts of money to be fair, but every bit helps I guess :)

My New Quest To Get Rid Of The Redness Of My Dome

Ooh err mrs, that sounds a bit rude :)

Day 2 of sanding... many more hours and very little progress.

 Another few hours... that's it I've had enough, I'm not getting anywhere fast :(

I decided to Spray my projectors and logic indicators (and I've not done a good job of that either)

My Quest For The Big Red Shiny Dome

Ok, I've read loads about to do this, so lets crack on and see what happens...

Firstly his head.

I'd seen lots of different ways to do the dome, from buying a metal one at around £500, or a Styrene one (a bit cheaper, but still not that cheap), using an ikea bowl or a B&Q shade (there are quite a few other ways too but... mah!!)

As I said the first 2 options were a little expensive and more than I was was wishing to spend, not sure why I didn't go for the Ikea bowl, but I decided to go with the B&Q shade.

And there she is, the little beauty. I didn't realize just how big he was going to be until I bought this.

So of I went with my trusty little sander. 

And here I am about an hour later :( - this is gonna be hard work

My Journey Begins

My son had started to play angry birds space and was starting to get interested in star wars, and I'd just seen an inflatable remote control R2D2 and thought "I want one".

So I thought I could pretend I was buying it for him and secretly just play with it myself...

MWAH HA HA HA HAAAA...

HA...

sorry. Anyhoo, I bought myself him one, and he loved it.. but then told me he wanted a real one (and to be honest I've always fancied having a go at making an R2D2, although I never thought I actually could make anything that looked anything like a real one), so I started investigating and found http://astromech.net/ and the R2D2 builders group. And there my journey began.