Dyne's 99-99 Build

[Dyne]

I got a fair amount done since the last update, including printing and painting all of the main body sections and head, adding the ball transfer units to the body, and testing the ... rollability (which works fine).  By far the largest print was the main body, which took twelve and a half hours on the 0.6 mm nozzle.



This print required a lot of support material inside (because the roof is flat with holes for the BTU's in it). Both getting it off the bed AND getting the support out of the cylinder were an enormous pain. I also had to deal with some body filler next to one of those rectangular panels and the little chevron shape above it (not the ones shown).  I have the magnets for the head, but I haven't put them in yet.  Strictly speaking, they aren't really necessary until I can spin the ball under motor control.

And to completely contradict my last statement, I have to report a fall.  At one point before I painted it, the ball slipped out of my hands and hit the corner of something on its way down onto the floor.  This caused a small bit of plastic damage (near the bottom in the photo below ... the top spots are just underextrusion holes that somehow didn't get properly filled, which I am steadfastly ignoring).  

This incident revealed that the plastic right around the damaged area was a bit spongy (likely due to the underextrusion issues on the rear of the head), which I hadn't noticed before as it isn't like that anywhere else.  I will eventually need to reprint the rear half of the head anyway, so I just decided to live with it for now.



These are the main rattle can colors I used.  Not shown are the self-etching primer and the black enamel that I used on the aluminum tube on the base, nor the green acrylic craft paints I'm brushing on for the lines.



Once I got the white and the yellow on together, I decided I wasn't really a fan of the combo.  When selecting the yellow, I either misremembered how pale the color I needed was or the store's lighting was messing with me.  I should've gone for the deeper yellow that I almost picked but put aside because I thought it was too much.  

This shade is too similar to the white (and it would've been worse with the heirloom white that I'd originally planned to use).  And even though I sprayed both colors with a satin clearcoat to help unify them, the originally flat white has a slightly different sheen that looks odd in some conditions, like it's not as well lit.

That's all fine.  The paint jobs on both droids are semi-temporary anyway, just to have them look somewhat correct for the con.


I clearcoated the lenses for both droids, which did improve their clarity.  This photo shows how they looked before this process (I did clean them off a bit to try and remove the red tinge from the polishing compound, which works somewhat.  



This is Four-Nines lens afterward:


Just ignore the green.  It's still in progress.  I could push them further, but I'm calling them good enough for now.  Need to decide how to attach them (so as not to get obvious glue everywhere inside the lens).


Here's the full droid so far.  The two yellow arms are going to be retracted as shown.  Depending how much time I have in the next few days, the white arms might also wind up being retracted.  But all four arms are fully painted and assembled.


The only thing that remains is to figure out what I want to do to attach the arms, and to model and print the internal structure (which at minimum is needed to secure the main body to the lower dome section, as well as mount any servos, battery holder, and microcontroller if I go crazy and decide to do last minute animation).