Sunday, October 31, 2010

Halloween 2010

This year we took it easy for Halloween and went over to Brad's house to help hand out candy. It got dark fast so there were only a few pictures that showed up well.  We had a great time handing out candy and warming up around the fire pit with R2 :)



It is offical!

It is official! I am now a member of the 501st Central Garrison! I am TD-7492.  We had a troop again this year at Vala's and it was a blast!  Non stop people taking photos with us all day long. Here are just a few of the pictures. The rest are on my Facebook page :).    (Link is to the right)
Uh sir? I think this is the wrong princess?


Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Still playing around

I will be getting back to droid work this week after another long break.
Got a few CONs coming up in November.

Here is one of four 3D renders I made the past few nights trying to figure out this new program.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Trying something new

Trying my hand at doing some 3D rendering. I have never done it before so I still have a ton to learn.
My friend Syrena is learning how to do 3D rendering for real in Florida right now and she inspired me to try it out.
Here is a quick render of what I have done so far. I took the T3 I made in real life and made a wire frame of it on my PC, then did a few little movements with it. Anything longer than a few seconds of rendered frames and my PC freezes up. LOL  (Need to get a new PC)


Sunday, October 24, 2010

Zoo Troop

Today we trooped the Omaha Zoo. There were thousands of people and we never had a minute without posing for pictures.
We did get a small break while we were in the desert dome so we took some fun pictures.
(Trooper)I said please keep off the sand!  (Jawa)But the planet is all sand?
Buckets off picture. Ahhhh, air!
Look sir! Droids!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Halloween at SAC museum

Got my ab buttons on, the thigh pieces have new velcro and I was good to go.
I went and helped the 501st do the family Halloween event this year in my armor. It was a blast!
Here is a few pictures and a short video of the event.  :)


Friday, October 22, 2010

Buttons

Today I worked on the hardest part of my armor build. The ab plate buttons.  I sanded the current black coating off and cleaned all the surfaces, then I put the buttons in three holes so the stand face up. Next I put three coats of R2 white on them and set them aside to dry for a few hours. WOW that was a lot of work, time for a nap. LOL
Later tonight if I have time I will attach them for the troop tomorrow.

40,000 views

I just noticed that this site has now gotten over 40,000+ views.
Thank you to everyone that takes a look at what I do for a hobby.
I hope you all are inspired to start your own project and help your own community and/or charity out.
It is what makes all this work worth while.

I would also like to that people like Victor Franco and Chris James for inpiring me to start this blog.
Your building blogs are what convinced me that I could build a robot without any previous knowledge. I thank you both ( and the other bloggers who do it for the communities and charities) very much.

This journey so far has been wonderful, I have shown many people how to build their own R2 and have formed lasting friendships with many of them. We have helped the 501st raise lots of money for Make A Wish as well as other children's charities. Putting smiles on peoples faces who had none, having people come up crying thanking us for coming so they can relive their childhood.  That is what it is all about. It makes all the BS and crap that goes along with a hobby like this worth while.

In closing I just want to say thank you again to everyone who reads this blog with the hopes of doing something good with the info with. I hope we get to meet some day if we already have not. :)

Moose

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

My first armored troop

Took my armor out for a test spin at a 501st event in Lincoln. It was a friend's concert at the local college that had some Star Wars music in it. It was a great first troop, just a few mods to the armor and all should be good.
We look like some 80s show called Shooter and the Moose. LOL
This means you, you rebels!
On stage.
Posing for pictures.
We had a great time! More pictures to come :)

Friday, October 15, 2010

Trooper gear adjustment

Finally getting around to trimming my armor to fit my body better.
I got one leg done, now I just need to make the other side match.
Only got two days left to get it done as I got a 501st event to troop.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

SG-1 score

I scored a full sized P-90 pellet gun for my SG-1 costume today and it cost me nothing! It was in a box of stuff that was going to be thrown away down at the shop. It is missing the battery pack and back cover but I do not care, I am going to gut it anyway. It even came with a removable scope. :D Just a few mods and it will be ready to roll!


Fixing Boo Boos

After taking 4 days away from building to get other personal stuff done and relax a bit I went back to work on a few projects. Started off by doing some more trimming to my Sandtrooper armor so it fits right. All the leg pieces are a bit long and not wide enough. So after trimming I will ad some more ABS to the back side.
Then one one corner of K-9 the side was bulging out a bit to far due to the reinforcements moving during the time it took the glue to set up. So I ended up carefully breaking it all back apart taking out the reinforcements as I went. Here is a picture of the carnage.


Here is a quick dry fit to see if I can get it to line back up properly. It does thankfully! Once I clean all the old glue out I will put it back together again with  new reinforcement brackets.  I also built the articulation of his neck and will install that before putting the rest of the body together.

Friday, October 8, 2010

K-9's last drive test.

One final test of the drive system and I think I got it. Now to just tighten everything up and give it one last alignment. Here is a video of K-9 at only 12 volts and 3/4 throttle. I could go 24 volts and full throttle but that would be overkill. LOL

Thursday, October 7, 2010

K-9's drive system take two

Here is the second test with his body on.  Still got some steering issues, next test drive I will use T3's remote.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

K-9's drive system

 I took the day off today and banged out a drive system for K-9. Not to bad for the first mock up.
Here is a short vid, tomorrow I will get him up to full speed on the street.  >:)

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Shenfest

The 501st Central Garrison  was nice enough to invite the Rebel Legion and R2-Central to the Shenfest Parade in Iowa. Just our luck by the time we drove all the way there it started raining.  We were bound and determined to still troop this event so we only used the the weatherproof droid heads.
Here we all are in our 501st and RL costumes getting caught in the rain.
Right before the parade started it went from rain to a downpour! Poor droids and troopers!
A little rain will not stop a true Star Wars fan :) Here we are, all smiles :)
Vader riding in style. The mouse droid is hiding from him.

As luck would have it the rain stopped once we got back to base after the parade.
Poor EG got a little waterlogged but is ok. LOL

Thanks again to the 501st for a great day. We look forward to the parade again next year!

K-9 Body work has started

It is after midnight and I am dead tired but I have an update I want to post ...
K-9's body has started going together! :)
Here is his back computer taped together.

K-9  letters
Ok, night!

Sunday, October 3, 2010

TV time for K-9

Today was a mess with K-9's view screen. A friend let me test out a screen that he had that was just collecting dust. For some reason the system kept crashing or not booting up at all when using an SD card for file input to I switched to using a USB flash stick. Then all sound control went dead so I had to open the unit up to re-solder two loose joints. Then with that fixed there was a 5 second per one minute lag between picture and sound. So after 10 minutes of viewing the sound was 50 seconds behind. So either I have to find a different format or chop everything up into one minute segments. Even if I do get that fixed I don't think I can format the sounds so they will be loud enough to hear from outside.  Hopefully once I take another crack at it I can get this thing working properly without it breaking down, if not at least it will work better than when I borrowed it LOL.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Silver time

Today I showed Jen how to silver the parts for her droid, after a quick lesson she went to work while I painted some other parts.
Here is R3 with her new red side plates installed as well as the ankle brackets, boosters, shoulder hubs, and a few other parts. Poor ED got no such love today.

Building and BBQing Part 2

Brad and Adam came over next, Brad worked on his battery boxes while Adam helped prep the grill with Jen.
Denny continued to work on his Clone.

I laid out some horse shoe spacers and cut one out.
Dawmer came over next but his van sprung a leak, so we worked on that instead of his droid..
So here is a pic of the horse shoe cut out.
We all worked on stuff till it got to dark to see, cleaning up the BBQ mess we called it a night.
The new grill Jen got worked great, the new concrete held up fine, and everyone got something done and something to eat. A good day :)

Building and BBQing Part 1

I repaired the driveway earlier this week so we all decided to take it for a test spin. Denny was the first to come over, he was working on his clone armor.Right now he is working on the bicep pieces.
While he was doing that I cut out two center vent covers by hand for R3 and R4. Lots of measuring to do!
The wind settled down for a bit so I painted the center vent cover for Jen's R3 after it was cut out and rough sanded..
While the paint was drying I cut out some ankle bracelets as well for the droid's legs.
Here is the finish vent cover, now I just need to mount everything once Jen is done making her cutom louvers for the insides.
Next I helped Denny glue his bicep pieces together and set them aside in clamps to dry.
More to come...