Well it’s been a busy couple of days on R2. I trimmed the foam in the skirt, painted it, and temporarily installed it:

I also worked on how the dome ring temporarily attaches and installed it in the dome:

Most of Saturday was spent on the dome. I filled in and bondo’d the remaining incorrect panel cut-outs.

Unfortunately, this dome is so beat-up that I’ll NEVER make it look like a pristine R2, so I’m going to have to go with a bit of a worn, weathered R2. If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I will here – I HATE KRYLON. I sprayed the dome with a nice, aluminum-looking Krylon paint and it looked great:

However, the darned stuff stayed soft. I let it dry for a couple hours which should be plenty of time, then masked it off for the panels with low-stick masking tape… but when I removed the tape from painting the panels, the blue dupli-color paint kept lifting. At one point, I wanted to throw the dome into the street, drop the $250.00, and buy a fiberglass dome…. but alas, I don’t have the $250.00 to spend, so I’ll make due with this one until the next run of laser-cut styrene domes. I’m not super happy with it, but I guess at least it looks like R2:

I still need to cut out the openings for the front and rear logic displays, but I’m not going to do that until I have them built up, that way if I don’t have them done before the first event in 2 weeks that I’m trying to have R2 ready for, there won’t be gaping holes in his dome.

I did spend a few minutes painting the vents etc. These are pretty rough castings, and I’ve done what I can to clean them up. They’ll eventually get replaced.

And here’s how he looks tonight, standing in the dining room.

I got a shipping notification for the skins, they’ll be delivered on Wednesday!