Sunday, August 28, 2011

Catching up

I've been busy! Outside of work my free time has been spent working on threepio and the blog is a few steps behind. Time to catch it up!

All of my pieces have been ordered but so far I have only received the head and feet.
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all the pieces needed for the head and eyes...
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Feet
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To get a head start, I've been working on getting the head up to snuff and making purchases almost every day for other supplies I'll need for the build before the other pieces arrive.

I picked up the ribbed rubber floor mat that is used for c3po's abdomen along with some zippers to fasten it.

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This is Lowes Hardware's item number for the mat material.
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I picked up two differnt length zippers. Once this is finished I'll let you know which one worked best.
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I did a rough cut to work out the shape and size but I think there may be a way to tailor it a tad more.

Here's a photo with the zipper temporarily hot-glued into place.
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The hot glue actually hold better than I expected although when the cut is worked out I will be stitching the zipper into place.


The mask was incredibly tight. Even though I have a small noggin (about 22" around at the wides point" it was barely able to fit into the mask. I realized that there was a bump on the inside where the detailed component on the back of the head would fit.
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Indent on outside of the mask...
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I decided to completely remove this and open up the back of the helmet.
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This gave me much more room and made it ever so slightly easier to get the mask on. When the detail bit is added on The hole will be covered but it won't jam into my head on the back, which is great! BUT I still have some more modifications that will give me a tiny bit more room and a few details I want to touch up on the mask. When everything is fixed up I may recast it and Make a thinner version. This one has an outer coat made with some kind of body filler, which looks like it was used instead of a typical gel-coat. why? no idea. Then the inside of that was fiberglassed. It's strong and most of the detail look really good but the way it's constructed adds some unnecessary weight and thickness. I think a new cast with one layer of gel coat and 2 or three thin layers of fiberglass will be strong enough, considerably lighter and give me more room inside. BUT I'm not ready to do that yet... In the next post I'll cover some of the modifications and fixes I'm working on.

See you soon!





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