Creating an inner dome
Blank Dome
In 2003 I was single, living in an apartment in Chicago, and I got the bug (from reading Alex Kung’s website) to build myself an R2-D2 replica. I spent a lot of time reading and researching via the R2Builders club, which at that time was a yahoo email group (but by now has a great forum and wiki at astromech.net). Having just recently gotten my first full-time job, I had a very small budget for robot parts. When a parts run opened up for budget, blank aluminum domes, I signed up. I think I spent $70 on it. Cut to 3 years later, and all I’ve done so far is sand out all the spin lines. Then, over the course of 1 week (I think I had taken the whole week off of work for some reason) I finally started doing some serious work on it
Fiberglass Tools
To provide a support structure for the panels I would be cutting out of the dome, I decided to create a fiberglass inner dome. This will be my first time working with fiberglass, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I did the whole thing with fiberglass “cloth”, whereas I’ve seen other people recommend using “mat” for strength. The dome has been prepped with car wax as a release agent, which ended up working really well.
Fiberglass laid into the dome
Inner dome unmolded
As the above image shows, the end product has a lot of pits, resulting from (I think) me rushing to lay the fiberglass in. I think I mixed too much hardener into the resin, making it set up really fast. Also, I ended up going back and laying in a few more layers for strength. I then filled in the really bad spots with bondo, but I had to be really careful so the domes would still fit together.