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A New Hope!
By the year 2000 I had been able to show the R2D2 unit at the university quite a few times. I had taken it to classes at the Electrical Engineering department and shown it to students. During my own stay as a professor at the University, I kept working on it and even hit the local newspaper. But eventually it was time to move on. As my profesorship at the University ended, I moved on to work for the industry. By June 2000, I was no longer a guy in Puerto Rico, but another puertorican in Rochester NY.
R2D2 moved in with me, but just like a puppet. The move had taken a toll and a good bunch of details had been corrupted, I guess due to boxes and stuff falling on him as he was shipped. During 2000 and 2001 I concentrated on building www.mcumaster.com. Then on 2001, as MCUMaster was clearly showing how much of a waste of time it all had been, I started to develop my own line of electronic products. That is when www.avayanelectronics.com was born. Most of the circuits I was designing were meant to be placed inside R2D2, as well as any other robot. These circuits would do R2 so much good! Unfortunately, as I looked back into the torn apart unit, I felt him calling me with a “Please fix me! Make me look good!”
May 2002 was growing closer, and to Star Wars fan this meant a new installment of the acclaimed prequel trilogy. To me it was much more. It was an opportunity to take the R2D2 into the movie theater and be the biggest fan ever (although most envious people would simply call me the biggest looser...). I had to make a vital decision. Do I work on repairing this unit or do I build a new one? Eventually I decided to build a new one. Why?
Reasons to build a new R2D2:
- The first R2D2 looked good but many details were simply wrong. The legs lacked all the beautiful ornaments the movie prop glows with. The head was lacking all forms of light and such. The body had a bunch of plastic props which were hideous!
- The head would not turn. The head (and the body) were not perfectly round. Plus the neck was a mechanical nightmare, designed to simply grab the head with the most horrendous screws you could imagine (I wish I had pictures of this madness).
- The feet may have looked like R2D2’s feet but they lacked all details. I wanted to improve these!
Fixing the old R2D2 would have been way too much work and money spent. Hence, it was back to the drawing board!
STEPS:
- New side legs were built from scratch. Using my milling machine and my index head, I was able to carve the most awesome legs from plywood. When compared to the legs I had carved years later using a router, the new ones would have made the real R2D2 jealous! (but only when compared to the old ones...)
- A new perfect round head was molded. This time I would make the head turn.
- Making a new body seemed like too much work and this is the only portion of the old body I kept. I made it perfectly round by cutting the non perfect round parts with a saw and then applying more fiberglass. Lots of sanding!
- All the accessories were developed on the machine shop, molded and then reproduced using liquid plastic from www.smoothon.com
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