Skins

I dove into the skins project this weekend. I had been thinking about how to proceed with the full size plans I got and getting them transferred to the sheets of .040 styrene I have. I tried copying them over with a pencil and ruler but this was time consuming and inaccurate. A pencil mark is pretty wide and sloppy. I also tried using some spray on adhesive and gluing the plans down to the styrene. The first try didn't work out. The stuff on the left from Elmer's leaves a residue and really screws up the styrene.



So I tried the stuff on the right. It's supposed to be lighter duty for tacking art pieces down. I also applied it to the paper not to the styrene. That seemed to help. There is still a residue left over when you peel it off. But denatured alcohol seems to take it off quite effectively. So I'll just rub down the droid when the skins are all on.

Styrene is cheap--$15 a sheet--so I am anticipating taking a few tries to get this right. There are a lot of alignment issues with the frame, the front and back skins, the second layer skin, and top and bottom edges, and so on. And a little screw up could be really visible. I am also trying to sort out which of the panels on which layer--inner or outer--I need to cut out. And I am going back and forth about doing a back hatch. I know that having one would be really handy for working on the robot's insides and electronics, but I know that alignment is going to be an issue and it'll be really hard to get it to look clean and good. Furthermore, in all of the pictures I have been able to check, the real R2 does not have a back hatch. So that big cut out rectangle on there is bugging me. The alternative is to access everything inside him through the top after taking off the dome. I'll know more about what I want to do once my dome gets here. So here's the inner front and back layers on, or at least, an early attempt at cutting them right:



Starting to look like the real thing.