Saturday 3 March
I found
good instructions for making a fibreglass dome at
Astromech.net (The official site of the R2D2 builders club) but because of a serious lack of fibre glassing skills I thought I would experiment with a vacuum formed dome. I tried this a few weeks ago and the results seemed ok (on a half size dome) formed with PETG plastic over one half of a 240mm polystyrene dome from the craft store. I started on the full size dome using the same instructions (see above) as a guide for the plug.
Note: before starting any of this I have spent a lot of evenings over the last month googling for all of the information and images I could find relating to building a full size R2D2 and Astromech.net and it's related
R2-D2 builders club have everything you need to know. I applied to join the group was was excited to receive a message the next day to say membership was approved - Welcome to the club. That was two weeks ago, and as suggested in my welcome letter I have been doing even more research since.
I am now at a point where I am comfortable enough to start with creating the dome.
The photos below illustrate the dome being made.
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| Cutting out a base for the dome from 12mm MDF on Saturday after having spent the morning making a circle jig for the router. |
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| After cutting out base for dome. Note: As I will be vacuum forming the dome from 3mm styrene, the wall thickness of the dome will vary in thickness from 3mm at the top to (I expect) about 1mm at the base. I have reduced the diameter of the base by 2mm to allow for this as the dome plug that I am making be the size of the inside of the final dome so in this respect, it differs from the plug for the fibreglass dome in the instructions above. |
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| Cutting out the first polystyrene layer to build up the dome. I forgot to mention that the dome will include the blue and silver neck rings as well. |
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| Fixing a block (using gorilla glue) to the base to hold the steel rod in place that will hold the dome former. |
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| Start of the process of laminating the polystyrene slices to build up a rough dome. Fixing the first slice to teh base with gorilla glue and applying pressure with weights while the glue dries. |
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| After all layers have been laminated and I have started carving and sanding them into shape to fit within the former. |
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| Polystyrene dome after initial shaping completed |
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Polystyrene dome after first layer of plaster.
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| Polystyrene dome after several layers of plaster - now the correct shape but still some has imperfections |
Looks great so far. Keep up the good work :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Chris.
DeleteThis is all new territory for me. Almost all of the skills required for this job will be new to me so it will be a very project satisfying complete.
Wow. Good on ya for building the dome yourself. I'd guess that you could count on one hand the R2 builders that have actually made their dome from scratch. Nice work!
ReplyDeleteHow did you scale up the dome profile.The one I downloaded from the r2 builders site is about 3. Inches .
ReplyDelete