Dyne's LD-F1 (D-O concept) build

[Dyne]

I know a lot of people will be away at Celebration right now, but I've made a little progress since February. Specifically, as of the end of March, the side plates for the tracks (which are the final parts of LD-F1's exterior bodywork) have been painted and weathered.  In the last photos that I showed, those parts were just raw black plastic and were hard to make out.
 
I don't have a photo of this, but before I began working on the paint job, I used a hot tool to weld the inboard seam between the two halves of each side plate, a place where it wouldn't be visible.  This was done to prevent the two parts from flexing easily at the joint and thereby cracking the paint job.

Then, I began filling the gaps, priming, and sanding to remove the print lines.

After doing as much of that as I could stand, I sprayed the parts with Rust-o-leum Bright Chrome.  This was to provide a metallic undercoat for weathering, which I figured would be exposed the most on these sections of the droid's body since they would see the most wear and paint removal.

The chrome exaggerates some persistent print artifacts in a few areas, like inside the circular surrounds at each end, especially on the port side plate.  In practice, the three foot rule applies.  Given how low the droid sits to the ground, these are difficult to see under normal conditions and viewing angles.  A lot of it is also covered by the paint and grime.  If the artifacts end up bothering me in the future, I'll make some thin styrene covers to glue into the circles.




After the chrome had fully dried, I used toothpaste to mask off some bits of the side plates ... mostly the exposed edges of the plates where they contact the track, the leading edges of the angled panel details, and some of the protruding circular surrounds.

Then I added a few coats of Gloss White spray paint.  I probably should have used the Flat White that I used on the rest of the droid, but I was low on that. (I also sort of forgot that the first layer of paint after the Bright Chrome sometimes tries to orange peel.  I should have given the chrome a light sanding where I knew the white paint was intended to remain intact, but it ended up working out in the end without that.  I just needed to go lighter on that first coat of white.)


After several coats of white, I let the paint cure for a few days and then sprayed it with the Satin Clear to bring the gloss finish back down to match the rest of the droid, and to seal the unweathered paint job.  I did this BEFORE wiping away the toothpaste mask so that the satin wouldn't dull the metallic.  Once the clear coat had dried, I started to wipe away the toothpaste mask.

Results were mixed; either removing the toothpaste after it had been drying for a few days caused it to pull away some of the shininess, or else the toothpaste had reacted with the chrome.  Either way, the metal isn't quite as uniformly shiny as before.  That's fine, as long as there's SOME shiny to catch the eye.

I was also able to expand on the chipped edges and add some realistic scratches with my thumbnail, and later with a wire brush, before the white paint completed the process of bonding to the chrome.

I then started applying mud and grime color to the middle regions of the side plates, moving outward.  When I got near the circles on either end, I used painter's tape to mask around the areas that were to be painted orange to match the droid's trim.  I did the orange with brushed acrylic in several coats, for opacity and smoothing out the brush strokes.  I ended up with some free natural weathering due to the painter's tape lifting a few sections of the white during removal.


Once the tape was off, I finished adding mud and grime to the circular areas.

Near the end of post #54 you may recall that I mentioned that one of the side plates had warped -- the one placed in the port front corner of the droid.  Rather than reprinting it as I was considering, I decided to keep the part and just going heavy on the masking/scratching in that area -- as if LD-F1 had rammed into something and the collission had caved in the surround, as well as the raised plate detail, with a lot of the paint getting abraded away in the process.


I may yet go back and make these parts a bit more grimy and possibly add some rusting.  But he's pretty close to (aesthetically) complete.