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Second Try:
When I felt I was going nowhere, a new strategy was devised. First I needed a few classes on resin so I got a fiberglass expert to teach me. He even allowed me to practice on his workplace. Great indeed! I also asked a friend to lend me his MPC model kit plans. I fotocopied them and enlarged them. They are still sticked on the doors of my room closet! But the most important step was finding a mold of the head! I was lucky to be employed by a security camera manufacturer from where I got the domes for free (scratched ones). The head was my limiting factor. Since it was so hard to find, the mold was used for the head and each other part was scaled to fit the head diameter (18.5").
Cylinder Body: With my new knowledge on fiberglass I devised a way to develop a fiberglass cylinder. Cut two circle holes out of plywood. The two plywood circle holes are used to hold a thin sheet of zinc. This will be the cylinder negative. Apply PVA (green polyvynil alcohol that will allow you to separate the part from the mold). Then apply the gel coat and finally the resin and fiberglass.
Dome Head: Find a perfect dome. Some lamps are made out of domes. Security camera companies manufacture plastic domes ideal for the application. Slide the dome into a perfect circle hole cut out from plywood. I did not did this and my R2's head is not perfectly round. That is why I did not work on its rotation feature. Apply PVA, Gelcoat, Resin and Fiberglass and there is a head.
ADVICE!!! Do the head first. Then use the head as the measure for the two plywood circles that will form the Cylinder Body negative.
Legs: On the second try I had not the tools to build good legs so I used molds created from zinc and strapped together with tape! I have no idea how I managed to build so many pieces with this pathetic technique, but that's how the ugly looking R2 shown below came to be. But do recall that the ugly duck became a very beautifull swan!
Psychology Profile: Feeling better. Long before I became psychopatic I was able to at least create something! It made me feel like I was improving and that my dream was becoming a voyage to reality.Still there was a lot of furious days as the technology used was not the most efficient.
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Ok, ok! So I am ashamed of this photo. I admit it... And it is not because of the Dilbert look of me on the photo but because of the pathetic prototype I once called beautifulity! (I know this word does not exist, but its sound mostly like what I thought of it). Actually this was my first prototype. The head and the cylinder were later reused, but the legs were discarded. In fact there is no trace of those legs these days, since I used the fiber glass for other prototypes and pieces. Yuk! What an horrible set of legs!
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The Second Try technology was based on fiberglass casting. All molds were done by cutting pieces of thin zinc sheets and taping them together. This resulted in horrible looking molds (and parts) and a painful casting time as the resin would sometimes unstick the tape before the resin hardened. When the photo was taken, I realized, this R2D2 looked nothing like the real one. THIRD TRY involved a lot of changes and technology creation, but the reward obtained was simply unimaginable!!!
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