Finished up the bottom row of the dome.

I finished up cutting out and cleaning up all of the bottom panels in my outer dome today. It took about 5 hours so far (a little longer than I was expecting). I taped all of the panels back into the dome with some masking tape to firm it up before cutting out the top pie panels. It felt sort of flimsy once all of the panels were out and I was afraid it was going to collapse while I was working on the top. It is a lot more solid now.

The first step of a long sort of robotized journey

This project started out after a discussion with my brother-n-law about how cool it would be to have R2-D2 hand out candy (Return of the Jedi Jabba barge tray style) for our yearly Halloween set up. This is one of the few prop projects that my wife actually liked so I decided to run with it. So I joined the Astromech.net forum in Dec of 2008 and started collecting parts for the R2.

I received my frame (a Commando 8 model) on Thursday and finally got a chance to work on it this weekend. It is an absolutely amazing design. I got the Platinum package and would definitely recommend it if you are doing a full metal droid build up.