Spaceport Arcade

For awhile now I have been working almost exclusively on this robot.  I was considering not posting anything about it here,  it has nothing to do with thirty-year-old video games.  Then I figured why not, this is really just a place for me to keep a journal of projects, and other silly things.  Besides, this is the "Spaceport Arcade" and what good is a spaceport without a robot or two.

I believe it was back in September or November that I really began.  The best reason I have for doing something like this was to force myself to learn a few new skills.  After a little research I learned that making a full size Astromech replica was a serious undertaking.   I could expect it to take a year or two, and be relatively expensive.   In the end however, I would have something totally unique, and a list of new skills as well.

This project started with a great deal of woodworking.  I'm no stranger to woodworking, but cutting circles and hoops to an exact size proved challenging.   Cutting out the pieces and assembling the frame that would eventually make the body of the droid forced me to use my router in ways that I never would've attempted, and I learned a great deal about what I was and wasn't capable of.

This is a frame designed by Mike Senna, one of the first people to ever build a working replica R2-D2.  Its a great design, very strong once assembled and surprisingly light weight.  I believe there are approximately 22 or 23 interlocking pieces.  

Then came the legs.  Cutting these from wood with a router would be enough of a challenge for most folks.  However that isn't good enough here, these have to be perfectly symmetrical and cut to exact dimensions.   Making a template from a paper pattern took me several tries and a few weekends.

The legs are made by cutting five layers of Baltic Birch of various shapes, then laminating those layers together to form the needed thickness.  Here are a few shots of the legs being assembled.

The piece you see above that has the channel down the middle is the inner most layer.  It will house the power cables that will eventually run down to the drive motors.

The barrel shaped Senna frame that I showed earlier gets wrapped in a styrene skin with a carefully cut pattern to match the design seen in the movies.  Cutting the skins out of plastic from the pattern was again, challenging, at least for me.  It was also very tedious and not something I want to do again in the near future.  There are four pieces that make up two layers for the front and back of the droid.  These are made by gluing a full sized pattern to a sheet of 0.04 inch thick styrene.  It took me several nights of careful work with a razor knife and ruler.

One last pic here of a test fit of the skins on the Senna frame.  This was done to hold the frame together for drying, and to be certain it was the correct size.

If you stumbled upon this blog and you're interested in building a replica R2-D2 or some other similar droid from the Star Wars Franchise, head on over to www.astromech.net.