Who the heck is RD-22?

OK, you've probably heard of R2-D2, the spunky little droid that accompanied Luke Skywalker on all his missions in the original Star Wars trilogy. If not, you've probably just never heard the little guy's name. R2-D2 is the little, trashcan-shaped robot that moves along beside the big golden robot (C-3PO, for all you afficianados), beeping in unintelligible noises that always sound like the Pied Piper of Hamlin. In case you're still unsure who R2-D2 is, see the picture below. (Thanks to Mike Verta for creating this image.)

Well, when the original Star Wars movies came out, I was a teenager, and I simply fell in love with the films. Well, all except Return of the Jedi... Anyhoo, I had posters and action figures all over my room, including several of R2-D2. The weird part was, although my mother knew who most of the characters were, she simply could not say R2-D2's name right. Whenever she mentioned the little droid, she always called him RD-22. It was pretty funny, and we all got a good laugh out of it.

Well, Star Wars went out of my life during college and for the early part of my marriage. Unfortunately, just after the birth of our first daughter, my mother passed away from complications related to lung cancer, She had smoked my whole life, and probably most of hers, and the cancer was pretty bad. I think she held on as long as she could, after I moved to North Carolina, when the cancer finally had its way with her. I made a quick trip back home, and my brother picked my up at the airport. We went to the hospital to see my mother, with me claiming that I just happened to be in the area on business. She seemed to accept the story, and it was apparently what she wanted for her last visit: her two sons together with her. I went back to spend the night with my father, and we got a phone call from my uncle (on my mother's side) in the middle of the night that she had passed away.

That was back in 1991. For whatever reason, Star Wars came back into my life after my mother passed away. Maybe it was the fact that I was now raising a daughter of my own, and I was reverting to my own childhood. Maybe it was a gut reaction... my mother had died, and I latched onto something that was able to take me away from the "real world." The fact remains that, shortly after this point, I started working on The Completely Unofficial Star Wars Encyclopedia, and became more and more immersed in the Star Wars universe again.

Fast-forward 16 years...

For the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars film, I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Los Angeles for the Celebration IV event. I got to spend a week with some of the gurus from the Wookieepedia, hosting a fan encyclopedia table in the Fan Fair Hall. There were all sorts of other booths around us, although we got stuck in the back corner of the room. (Luckily, the 501st booth was just across the aisle from us, and we got a lot of traffic just from them.) There was a massive diarama of the Endor forest being build just behind us, and there was a small stage were little kids staged lightsaber battles with Imperial forces. In between the forest and the stage, however, was what appeared to be a racecourse. We had to look up in our programs what it was all about: droid racing.

Now, my primary interest at the C-IV (outside of the encyclopedia booth) was Jedi costuming. My wife's aunt made me an awesome Qui-Gon Jinn costume, and I was going to spent time investigating what more I needed to have an "authentic" Jedi costume. Well, the costuming groups that were there were quite nice, but there seemed to be a wide range of requirements, depending on the group. When I found that I was going to have to spent upwards of $200 to get an authentic belt, I choked a bit, and turned to my old stand-by mentality: I can build it myself.

When I saw that there were going to be droid races, however, I got a bit sidetracked. I had minored in robotics in college, but had only worked with simply Erector-set robots that were programmed on old Zenith computers. (You remember the Zeniths, right? They were made almost completely of cast-iron, had the keyboard integrated into the base unit, and had about 16KB of memory on the motherboard!) The fact that regular fans were building their own droids was pretty cool! I set out for the Droid Builders room one afternoon, and was completely blown away. After talking with some of the builders, and looking at all the different ways a droid could be built, I knew that I had to build one myself.

A few months after C-IV, I approached my wife with the idea of building my own R2-D2. She dismissively waved her hand at me and said "Whatever," although I think that she now regrets that decision, especially after seeing the little RC R2-D2s at The Sharper Image. Since I have two daughters in school who are getting ready for college, I figured that I wasn't going to be able to go whole-hog and build an all-aluminum droid. Not to mention, I don't have any equipment or skills for metalwork. Woodwork, however, was well within my capabilities, and between my father-in-law and I we had all the tools. So, my course was laid in. I would build a wooden frame droid, with styrene and resin parts. I would only use aluminum if it wasn't going to be painted.

Being something of a non-conformist, I didn't want to just build another R2-D2. Yes, he's cool, and he's become so iconic that anyone would recognize him. But, that wasn't what I wanted. After getting a visit from an R7-series astromech at C-IV (see the picture below), I figured that I could go off the beaten path and build something of my own. This, of course, meant that I couldn't name the droid R2-D2. It was then that I came up with the idea of naming it RD-22, the way my mother used to say R2-D2. It was the perfect plan.

From there, I came up with the unusual color scheme. The base color would be the almond color of my mother's old 1972 Lincoln Continental. Accessory colors would come from the red and black of my favorite hockey team, the 2006Stanley Cup Champions, the Carolina Hurricanes. I did a couple of quick PhotoShop jobs on existing R2-D2 art, to get a sense for what needed to be painted, what should be the base color, and what should appear to be metal. Then, I joined all Astromech Builders and R2Builders groups on Yahoo!, and started researching what would be required. It was a lot of work, with a bit of luck thrown in to get the right parts, but I was up for the challenge. My goal was to come up with something that looked like the image below. (Thanks again to Mike Verta...)

The rest of this website is dedicated to this build. Feel free to wander around and see what I'm up to, and where I'm going next. For grins and giggles, I also included a page called The Build So Far, which tallies up the costs involved with building my low-tech droid. My wife should probably avoid this page...!