Shoulder Flanges

Finished up the shoulder flanges and painted them with Testors Metalizer Stainless Steel (Buffable) and mounted them to the frame for fitting.

Faux Brass Radar Eye

Here is the Radar Eye with a faux brass finish.

The last pic shows the styrene part next to a real brass and copper Bosun's Pipe I picked up in the Navy.  I think I got it pretty close!

Jeepers....creepers...

So after realizing that the shape of the R6 head would constitute a different shaped Radar eye (One that would fit a cone, rather than a dome), and realizing that none were being cast, or crafted by anyone else, I set out to make my own.  I pulled up the R6 blueprints, along with a few reference photos (there aren't that many of R6!), and came up with what I consider to be the closes representation  of an R6 Radar Eye housing I could.

This will, of course need some filling and sanding, and I still need to make the side boxes.   But shes starting to take shape.  Here is a shot of the new one next to my R2 Radar Eye -

Soon Ill be getting out the filler and the sand paper and going to town on this bad boy.  It would be nice if I could get a good enough copy to cast in resin, but if not, the Styrene should be strong enough.  Its certainly stout. 

Another thought I had was that instead of the traditional radar eye lens, I would go for something keeping with the military inspiration, something inspired by the FLIR Camera's seen on Helos:

Wile cruising the Inter-tubez, I found a dummy security camera that is about the right size, and shape, and I think would look kinda nifty.  What do you guys think?

R6-S6 - "Essex"

So, since i have decided to change my Droid to an R6 model, I have chosen the name "Essex" and the designation R6-S6.  Here is the proposed Color Scheme: 

Essex will be something of a Tribute to the US Navy, and the other armed services, while still retaining an in-universe feel.  For those who do not know, the "Essex" Class Carrier was the backbone of the US Navy fleet during WWII and on through the 60's.  My Grandfather served aboard the Essex Class carrier, the USS Valley Forge (CV-45) during Korea.

Since a lot of what I do with my love of Star Wars is try and give back through Costuming Troops and Fund-raising with multiple charities, I wanted to represent the men in uniform that I served with that might have left families behind, paying the ultimate price for their country.  R6-S6 will be employed to raise money for Veteran's Charities, and just to make merry where ever he goes.

The colors I have chose are each representative of the Us Navy and Marine Corp; haze gray, Navy blue, Brass, and Crimson Red (foot hoses).

Ok, So it has been a good long while since I have posted here.  School and life got in the way of Droid building, but I have some exciting (well at least for me) news -

I am currently setting the R3 clear dome to the side, and going to turn my Droid into an R6 model:

I really like the look of these guys, and there aren't many of them out there.  I really like the "expression" on their faces, and they are just a little more visually interesting.  Right now I am cooking up some plans to make the new head out of Styrene.

My plans for the R3 dome are to either turn it into a "car Droid" that will go on top of my Car for Mando Mercs events, or to turn him into a "mini Droid" such as this one done by Craig Smith:

So that is the plan for now.  I gotta finish one costume before work can really begin again, but skins will be coming soon, so stay tuned, True believers!

Dome, duh Dome Dome!

some more work done on the dome this past week.  More paint and weathering and mounted the Radar eye.

Dome

 I received my dome yesterday and couldn't wait to tear into that bad boy. 



Now, this dome isn't movie spec, but it can be made close with some additional work that I will document here.    As I said, I couldn't wait to begin work, and got a little too ambitious for my own good.  Using a technique I have employed many times on my costumes, I used a liquid masking agent (in this case, Mustard) and painted, wiped the masking agent off, applied more, painted again.  Gives a very weathered, damaged look of chipping paint on something that has been painted over many times.  Trouble is, it would see some of my paint had gone bad after a summer in the Texas heat.  After the 4th coat, the paint began to crackle, split, and look like a mud pit after a drought. 

It took me an hour to carefully strip all the paint off (and there was a lot of paint) with a paper towel and a small bottle of Naptha.  I decided to stick a little closer to canon refferences and just do one layer on the R3 dome, with lots of scratches and paint chips.  The pie panels are painted and I have started inital weathering.