September 8, 2007 - Color Splash... with Bob Vitas

(from my Star Wars Blog)

Well, remember I talked about commitment a while back? I've finally passed the color barrier. I have been laying down coats of paint on a lot of the little things that go onto the astromech's body, and figured it was time to catch y'all up on my progress.

Obviously, the first thing to do on any painting project is to get things primed. The primer helps the outer layers of paint stick to the surface being painted. There are a lots of goodies to paint on a droid. This first picture shows the booster covers and the vents that are found on the body, along with the power couplings. The second picture shows the little doodads that adorn the outside of the droid's shoulders.

Once the primer had dried, it was time to paint. Some things are just plain chrome, like the coin returns and the center vents. Some things were parts of other things.

In this picture, you can see what appear to be little stop signs. These red panels go behind the octagonal ports. (More on those later...)

Then, there is all the red stuff. As noted in an earlier blog entry, my color scheme is based on two things: the cream color of my mother's old Lincoln Continental, and the red and black of the Carolina Hurricanes. Thus, I had to figure out an appropriate way to get the red stuff to be a nice, metallic red. You can't see it in this picture, but I started out with a basic red basecoat, then added a metal-flake top coat. On top of this will go a clearcoat to seal the deal. I can tell you from looking at these parts that they will look awesome on RD-22. The metal flakes give it the look of a hotrod car, or a metallic droid.

I told you there would be more on the octagonal ports. Well, I was going to skin the whole frame up this weekend, but it became apparent that I was going to need to get the goodies that went behind the skins in place first. This meant doing a little more surgery on the frame. My ancient B&D Wizard tool had finally given up the ghost a few months ago, so I broke down and bought a Dremel kit at the local Target. This thing is awesome! I was able to clean out the places for the side vents, as well as the two octagonal ports.

Once these were trimmed out, I was able to set in the completed octagonal port and glue it in. Note that this one needed an entire frame slat trimmed out of the way... Once the glue had set up, I wrapped the skin around the port to make sure it looked OK. Take a look and tell me what you think...

That's it for today, everyone. I need to put my toys away and take another shower, as my wife and I are going to a party this evening. This summer in North Carolina has been brutal. The temperatures have been in the mid to upper 90s for weeks, which is bad enough. The pain in the butt part is that we're in a moderate to severe drought, but it's always 70% humidity outside! How can the air be that moist, and yet it won't rain?!?! All it means is that spending three hours outside working on RD-22 means that I'm going to sweat through anything I put on. So, two changes of clothes and two showers a day are the norm these days... Ugh.

Bob
September 8, 2007