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Before I get fully into the topic for today...
If anyone is seriously considering building this droid in the near term, let me know. I'm not ready for the full file release yet, but I could gather up the STL files and instructions for the track links, track pads, and the little jig that lets you cut the link pins to the right length. Those files are definitely not changing and though they aren't huge, they represent 213 of the ca. 321 printed parts needed for this build, so it would be a pretty decent head start.
Just be aware that for the rest of the droid, there will be several large parts -- like the rear body shell and rear chassis parts -- that you'll eventually need to figure out how to print. They won't be easy to split and currently won't fit on much smaller than a 320x320 build plate, even diagonally. They are considerably longer than they are wide or tall, so a belt printer could also work. (My printer is 400x400, and the only major parts that I've had to explicitly design to be printed in multiple pieces were those cosmetic track panels that I added in February.) As for Z height, most parts are pretty short. The starboard side of the head requires the most Z height, at around 224 mm, followed by the sprocket bodies and the body shells, which are printed on edge, as shown in Post #36 and Post #37.
Anyway, moving on.
I've been considering printing out a handful of small figures of LD-F1 to give away at Dragon Con (I know people sometimes give away small printed Mouse Droids or whatever to fans). Last weekend I contemplated some of the details, and then started making variants of the main sub-assemblies (tracks, body, head, and neck) without all the screw holes and gaps in the walls and such.
I specifically want his head to be pose-able (given that the head tilts are basically his signature move). My friend suggested a small ring magnet-ball bearing pair, similar to what's used for some mecha miniatures, one in the head, one attached to the neck. That'd allow tilt, nod, and rotation with no problem.
I'd prefer making these figures at 1/12th scale (similar to the scale of the Black Series figures and the Bandai droid models), but at that size I will need to beef up the neck substantially and probably print the parts on my resin printer. To give you some idea of the range, if you notice the blue highlighted section of the neck in the image below, it has a diameter of 12 mm, so at scale that part would end up being only 1 mm in diameter. The large disk is 50.8 mm (two inches) so it'd be slightly over 4mm.
![[Image: 20230625-neck.png]](https://www.niflheim.net/droidbuilding/images/LD-F1/20230625-neck.png)
I don't recall if I ever mentioned this, but since I was pondering the printable figure, I remembered that at some point after last Dragon Con I stumbled across what is (as far as I'm aware) the only other physical model of this Luke Fisher concept droid that exists. It's a set of STL files by Colin/BigBangCollectibles on Etsy for printing a 1/6 scale static figure.
Colin interpreted the droid differently than I did -- instead of reading the taper as foreshortening like I have, he read it as a fairly exaggerated slant in a considerably shorter droid (lengthwise), resulting in the tracks being taller in the front than the rear .
As you may recall, I considered going that route myself very early on. I commented on it way back in post #1. Ultimately, the main reason I didn't was because the two panels on the side plates of the tracks seem like they are meant to be mirror images of one another. If mirroring wasn't the intent, then I certainly wouldn't have designed them to look that way, and I doubt Luke Fisher would've either.
In a motorized droid, I'd worry that the short wheelbase would give it a tendency to faceplant unless you put a lot of counterweight in the rear, and I think the lift mechanism would be even less plausible due to the Etsy version's shortened wheelbase. All that said, it's still a neat looking interpretation and as a static model it's fine. It even has a more faithful version of the track pads.
If anyone is seriously considering building this droid in the near term, let me know. I'm not ready for the full file release yet, but I could gather up the STL files and instructions for the track links, track pads, and the little jig that lets you cut the link pins to the right length. Those files are definitely not changing and though they aren't huge, they represent 213 of the ca. 321 printed parts needed for this build, so it would be a pretty decent head start.
Just be aware that for the rest of the droid, there will be several large parts -- like the rear body shell and rear chassis parts -- that you'll eventually need to figure out how to print. They won't be easy to split and currently won't fit on much smaller than a 320x320 build plate, even diagonally. They are considerably longer than they are wide or tall, so a belt printer could also work. (My printer is 400x400, and the only major parts that I've had to explicitly design to be printed in multiple pieces were those cosmetic track panels that I added in February.) As for Z height, most parts are pretty short. The starboard side of the head requires the most Z height, at around 224 mm, followed by the sprocket bodies and the body shells, which are printed on edge, as shown in Post #36 and Post #37.
Anyway, moving on.
I've been considering printing out a handful of small figures of LD-F1 to give away at Dragon Con (I know people sometimes give away small printed Mouse Droids or whatever to fans). Last weekend I contemplated some of the details, and then started making variants of the main sub-assemblies (tracks, body, head, and neck) without all the screw holes and gaps in the walls and such.
I specifically want his head to be pose-able (given that the head tilts are basically his signature move). My friend suggested a small ring magnet-ball bearing pair, similar to what's used for some mecha miniatures, one in the head, one attached to the neck. That'd allow tilt, nod, and rotation with no problem.
I'd prefer making these figures at 1/12th scale (similar to the scale of the Black Series figures and the Bandai droid models), but at that size I will need to beef up the neck substantially and probably print the parts on my resin printer. To give you some idea of the range, if you notice the blue highlighted section of the neck in the image below, it has a diameter of 12 mm, so at scale that part would end up being only 1 mm in diameter. The large disk is 50.8 mm (two inches) so it'd be slightly over 4mm.
I don't recall if I ever mentioned this, but since I was pondering the printable figure, I remembered that at some point after last Dragon Con I stumbled across what is (as far as I'm aware) the only other physical model of this Luke Fisher concept droid that exists. It's a set of STL files by Colin/BigBangCollectibles on Etsy for printing a 1/6 scale static figure.
Colin interpreted the droid differently than I did -- instead of reading the taper as foreshortening like I have, he read it as a fairly exaggerated slant in a considerably shorter droid (lengthwise), resulting in the tracks being taller in the front than the rear .
As you may recall, I considered going that route myself very early on. I commented on it way back in post #1. Ultimately, the main reason I didn't was because the two panels on the side plates of the tracks seem like they are meant to be mirror images of one another. If mirroring wasn't the intent, then I certainly wouldn't have designed them to look that way, and I doubt Luke Fisher would've either.
In a motorized droid, I'd worry that the short wheelbase would give it a tendency to faceplant unless you put a lot of counterweight in the rear, and I think the lift mechanism would be even less plausible due to the Etsy version's shortened wheelbase. All that said, it's still a neat looking interpretation and as a static model it's fine. It even has a more faithful version of the track pads.