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Studio Scale Probe Droid

Finally finished this one. It was tricky because it's round and has a lot of curves.  It was this project that made me decide the build a CNC. I got tired of trying to make perfect circles by hand so I researched a DIY CNC and spent months building one.  It definitely would have made building the Probe Droid a lot easier.  To start I cut ribs that made up the profile of the separate sections.  I then filled the gaps between the ribs with foam and covered the whole piece with auto body filler.  The stuff sands to an amazing finish but the smell is awful.

 

Before the CNC this was my best idea for cutting circles.  

 

Another example of where a CNC would have come in handy.  A bunch of repetitious parts that all need to match.  By hand you can get close but not nearly as accurate as a machine.

 

After I had all the forms I made molds and then cast them in resin.  If I had to do it again I would just vacuum form the whole thing.  This takes me to another project this droid spawned. I spent a bunch of time researching vacuum form machine and decided to build one.   It's probably my favorite tool in the shop!

 

 

 

And now on to the fun part - making it move.  There's been a few kits online of the probe droid and quite a few people have added electronics to them.  I really wanted to take the challenge and work with a microcontroller and build it from scratch.  After some snooping around on the internet I came across the Picaxe chip. The Picaxe chips are no different then your ordinary PIC microcontroller accept they add their open programming that allows you to program it with a very simple language. It didn't take long at all to learn the programming and after some trial and error I got everything working exactly how I imagined.

 

 

At first I tested the wiring and program on a breadboard. This made it a lot easier to make changes.

 

 

 

 

Then on to the painting. In all the photos from the traveling show the Probe Droid appears to have a brown hue to it.  I believe this was done when it was reused for Return of the Jedi.  I prefer sticking with Black.  I base coated the whole model with Tamiya Flat Black the dusted it with a Dark Aluminum. All of the weathering was then done with pastels.

 

To create the base I used Woodland Scenic's method for snow.  It starts with their Flex Paste to build up the forms.  Once this is dry to cover that with their Snow Flake.  The result is really convincing.   

1/3 Scale Han Solo in Carbonite Finished Shots

Time for Casting

Okay,  I finally made it and by that I mean  a mold that worked. 

I was originally going to brush in resin but due to the size I thought it would be best to make this out of fiberglass.  Unfortunately,  I had never used fiberglass before.  I really didn't want to use it in the past because of the fumes but I read about an epoxy resin that Smooth-On sells.  I went ahead and bought a trial size of the EpoxAcoat Red for the gelcoat and EpoxAmite to lay the glass. 

For my first try at fiberglass it went pretty will and the cast only required a little work to get it perfect.

Han Solo in Carbonite Molding

I finally finished this thing.  It seems like it has taken forever - actually it has.  After my first shot at molding this turned into a disaster I had to start at the beginning again. 

The first time I molded the piece I used Brush-on 35 from Smooth-On.  This was a really bad choice for a few reasons and to make matters worse I used the wrong mold release.  The result was a mold that stuck to the piece and wouldn't come off!

After I applied several layers I made the mother mold with Smooth-0n's Plasti-Paste. When all that dried is the momonet I started pulling my hair out and screaming.  There is nothiung more frustrating and disappointing than a mold that won't open or come loose.  Well,  I made a really rookie mistake and paid for it so I cleaned up the mold the best I could and poured some resin into whatever I could salvage.  I was able to pull  a good cast of the face, hands, and body so I rebuilt the box and started over.

And once again back to molding.  This time I used Mold Max 30 which I started by brushing on a thin coat.  Once that was tacky I started layering on coats that I thickened with Thi-vex.

After the silicone was built up to about 1/4" thick I surrounded it with a box of wood.

I then filled the void with expanding foam to serve as the mother mold.