Sorry it took me so long to update my blog. I hit a bit of a setback and it has taken me a while to get back on track. Unfortunately I will not be able to have R2 completed by the time the movie comes out. Oh well it was a long shot anyway. Life kinda got in the way, as it usually does. Plus I hit a snag with the painting of the rest of the dome.

Masked off the blue panels that I had just painted. The first mistake had already happened by this point. I should have painted the overall dome first. Not realizing this at this point I put my first coat of silver.

  This is actually the third coat of silver. I did not take any pictures of the other coats because I wanted to wait until the final coat to get a good picture. It was about this time that I started to realize that this was going to be harder than I thought it would be. It may not look like it here, but there is all kind of issues I was having. I put it on too think a one place so I had a paint run. And it was windy so I had some small foreign objects that had blown on to it. So I had to fix those issues with sanding, lots and lots of sanding. No big deal, mistakes happens.

 

Ready to try again, But this time before I started, I put up some plastic. I am actually doing my painting under our deck so I just stapled some plastic sheeting to the wood. Making a make-shift paint booth.

I also found a box that I used to elevate the dome off the table a little bit, I don’t know if it helped improve the paint at the bottom at all but I figured that it couldn’t hurt. I also slowed down a little bit making sure to not get any runs.

Yeah! Looking pretty good, finally.

Until I tried to touch it. Every time I did, it left streaks. No mater how lightly it was touched. I thought, OK that just means I will have to put a clear coat over it. No big deal, right. I was planing on doing that anyway.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the outcome, (I was starting to get REALLY frustrated) apparently there is an issue with some combinations of metal colored spray paint and some clear coats. Instead of it creating a nice tough glossy finish it will turn it grey. Something about the clear coat taking all of the reflective nature of the metallic pain out.

AARRGGHH

I had some research to do.

I looked at the Astromech forums to see if I could get any ideas, but it can take a long time to sort through those boards, and it seems to me (I could be wrong) that about 90 to 95% of the people on there have an aluminum dome so they would not have this issue. And the people who do have paint their dome either figured out how to do the paint on their own, or they use a paste/wax product call rub-n-buff. I actually tried rub-n-buff before I started painting and I just could not get it right. But there are some domes that look absolutely amazing using it, I could never get the technique down.

I finally tracked down a possible solution. Future floor wax. It turns out that scale model builders run into this issue a lot. Especially the guys that do military and air craft scale models. Its actually a water soluble acrylic floor coating developed for linoleum floors. Since it is acrylic it will dry clear and will not yellow over time. And since it is water soluble, if I have any issues, all it takes to take off is ammonia, or Windex.

So I put another coat of silver on. Another great job without a picture.

This is the while I was waiting for the stuff to dry. I was pretty nervous because I wasn’t sure if the milky part would go away or not. It did.

This is after it dried, looks pretty good.

But again, the camera is not picking up what was very obvious to the naked eye. Brush stokes. OK, I thought, no problem I can just take it off with some Windex and try  again. So I tried again. And again. And again. I tied regular brushes, foam brushes, sponges, spraying it on. Nothing worked. There was always some very obvious streak, or brush stoke or something.I got it the best I could and figured it’s probably not that bad and I was just being hyper critical of it.

Remember when I mentioned my first mistake at the beginning. It was at this point that I figured that out. I had left the same masking on through this entire process. Probably 2 to 3 weeks. That is WAY too long to leave painters tape on. Not only did the blue paint chip as it was coming off, it left behind tape residue that I just could not get off.

In the gaming world there is a phrase that is used called “Rage Quit”. It means just what you think it would. You get so frustrated and mad at an outcome that you just quit, immediately, and just walk away. That’s what I did I walked away.

For a month.

When I decided to start up again I realized I actually had two problems. One being the messed up blue paint. The other was something that I had noticed about 3/4 of the way through getting the silver paint right. I had put on so many layers of paint that is was getting noticeably heavier. I wanted to get all of that paint off and just start over.

My first option was to sand it all down. That was not going to happen. It would have be by hand because of the curves. and just judging by the spot sanding I had done earlier in the process, it would take a very long time and would be pretty tiring. I had the idea to try acetone, but I was not sure how that would affect the dome itself. I e-mailed the guy who actually made the dome and asked him. He said that yeah acetone would work and would not harm the dome itself. But he said that he had tried to clean paint off of other objects with acetone and it ended up being just a big mess. What he suggested was to try soda blasting it.

Soda blasting is just like sand blasting, but instead of sand you use bicarbonate of soda. Baking soda. Its a much gentler method of removing paint. I’ve seen videos on-line where people are soda blasting their car and it does not damage either the chrome or the glass. After researching for a bit, I realized that I could get the equipment needed to do the actual blasting relatively cheaply, but because of the nature of soda blasting, the air compressor needs to be pretty beefy. I didn’t want to buy a much bigger air compressor than I would need for 99% of the jobs I would probably use it for. I then realized that I have access to a industrial sized air compressor at work. The only down side would be that I could only use it on the weekends when no one would be using it. And as I would later realize that there would be no good way to capture and reuse the soda, which would mean I would have to keep buying more media.

This is the equipment, basically an air gun with a rubber hose attached to a feeder pipe that you stick into the soda.

Soda media

After first time. I’ve probably taken off one or two layers at this point. hadn’t started on the blue that much yet.

After the second weekend. I went through a fifty pound bag of media but I was able to take off a significant about of paint. Started getting down to the bare dome.

After the third and final weekend.

Tina went with me on the last trip and was able to take some video.

When I was stripping the paint I accidentally dropped the dome on a rock.

Nothing a little body filler cant fix

So time to start the painting process over again. This time I got a different type of spray paint, more of a professional type, as compared to some from home depot.

After the first light coat of primer all of these pin holes from the forming process really popped out. It wasn’t a surprise I saw them as I was stripping off the paint. This scratch coat was just used to highlight them so I could then fill them with putty.

Holes taken care of, now to start sanding…again.

The new silver is on, It’s not perfect, and it’s not as shiny as it was before, but I’m fine with that. But if you look at R2 during the original trilogy, besides the last scene in the throne room, he is pretty banged up. I actually like this better than the original paint job. to me it looks more like actual metal. Also notice that I painted the silver first this time.

And here it is. I am finally back to were I was 3 months ago.

Several times throughout these past 3 moths I was asked, “Why don’t you just take it to a professional to strip it and paint it?”  Yeah, I could have probably done that. But I really want to do this as much as possible by myself. I’m going to make mistakes, and I am going to get very frustrated. I’m going to get pissed off and confused. And it is going to take a lot longer than I want it to. But at the end of it all I want to be able to look at it and say I made that, all of it.