December 10, 2007 - Chasing Skirts

Ever notice how this droid seems to be taking on a female personality, at least from the titles of my updates? Well, it's got nothing to do with anything, other than the names of the droid parts end up in a lot of popular (or unpopular, depending...) phrases.

Today's update has to do with the skirt that goes underneath the main cylinder of the body. It basically helps to taper or soften the visual rectangle of the body, and gives a little more room inside the body ot hold the center leg. I had originally thought of trying to build one myself out of wood, but the problem is that the front and back sections of the skirt need to be curved to match the curve of the body cylinder. I figured that I could do it with sections of MDF, since nobody would be looking that close at the underside of the body anyway. But, the more I looked at it, the more I figured that I would just buy the stuff to make one.

Andy Schwartz and Alex Kung came to rescue again, this time with a styrene kit that takes a bit of building, but comes out pretty close to the real deal. Alex's website has the instructions on how to put it together. So, with that link in hand, I moved on to construction. The first couple of steps were easy, just building the box where the center foot sits. After that, it got progressively harder. Bending the styrene to fit the cylinder curve was pretty easy, and the upper and lower panels of the skirt were notched to help align things. However, the little detail pieces around the edge of the skirt were a pain in the butt! You've got to glue them together as rectangles, but you only have three sides! I used a roll of blue masking tape here, trying to keep them in shape as they dried.

Once the details were dry, I had to attach them to the skirt. Again, the task was made easier because Andy and Alex notched all the other pieces. The key here was that each of the little details was different from the others, since they were to go in different positions around the curved panel. It took some trial and error, but I got them all in place.

Inside the entire skirt, I went over all the edges with a hot glue gun. This helped to seal the gaps, as well as add strength to some of the joints.

Because the styrene can't be laser-cut on a specific angle, the edges where each piece was glued to the next had to be filled with bondo and sanded down. I tried hard not to leave extra bondo behind, since the stuff dries rock-hard, and I figured that I couldn't get a piece of sand paper down inside the details. Well, I ended up leaving quite a bit of bondo, and it actually was hard to sand around the details. I ended up trying little pieces of sand paper (not enough surface area), grinding with the Dremel (too much collateral damage to the surrounding styrene), and scraping with the blade of a flat-head screwdriver. What a pain.

When all was said and done, I got as much bondo off as I could, and then primed the skirt to see what kind of a mess I had made. Turned out to a sorta big mess, so I got the sandpaper out and did a little more work. I finally got it to a point I was satisfied with, and slapped a couple coats of the almond color on it. Then, it was time to attach it to the bottom of the body.

This step turned out to be a bit harder than expected, since the base of the skirt had warped a bit. With some more blue masking tape and my trust tube of Welder glue, I got it in place. A couple of the detail pieces pulled away from the skirt, so I had to go back with some paintable caulking to fill them back in. While the process worked well, the glue actually melted the styrene in a couple of places. I figured that these were like birthmarks on the droid, and decided to keep the marks. They actually look like places where the droid might have bumped up against something solid (like the superstructure of a starfighter or something), so I'll probably do some weathering on the paint job to enhance this illusion.

Bob
December 10, 2007