Skirt Part 4

The next step on the skirt where the strip details that go on the curved sides. I started by cutting a piece of wood to the correct width and thickness. Once I figured out the angles on each end I marked up the raw stock leaving enough room in between the pieces to make the cuts.

I made the rough cuts with a saw and then cleaned them up on my mini belt sander.





Here are the finished pieces.

I attached them with Gorilla glue and a small brad nails at either end. The ends of the pieces are going to be prone to splitting so I pre-drilled for the nails. A good trick is to actually put one of the nails into you drill and use that to make the pilot holes. The Gorilla glue expands as it dries so you can see a lot squeezing out between the parts.

 


Here are all the pieces attached and the glue cleaned up.I also needed to sand the end of each piece flush with the bottom of the skirt.

 




Finally I used hobby putty to fill in the gaps between the styrene and wood and to fill the nail holes.





Here is the finished product after sanding and painting.

Skirt Part 3

The hardest part of the skirt was the curved section in the front and back. I believe I found drawings of these parts that I used to make a poster board template. I used the template to make sure it had the correct fit. Once the fit was correct I cut the parts out of styrene.

I used glue and a pneumatic stapler to attach one end of the styrene to the mounting strip that I had attached to the wood side. The strip allowed the styrene to be mounted flush with the wood on the side.

I played around with a lot of different adhesives while building my droid and I found the the white Gorilla Glue worked really good for attaching styrene to wood. 

I wrapped the piece around and used some small brad nails to attach it to the block on the other side as well as the middle blocks.

Skirt Part 2

I unfortunately didn’t take any good pictures of the next part of the skirt assembly, but here is one that show a good part of it.

The first thing I built was the plywood frame that goes around the area where the center foot goes. Normally I would cut the ends of the pieces on a 45 degree angle to join them together, but there isn’t enough room at the corners for that to fit, the corners of the box would actually stick out beyond the edge of the bottom plate. I probably could have still done this, and just cut the corners off, but what I ended up doing was still cutting the corners at 45, but attached them in reverse to that the corners did not stick out.

For the flat sides of the skirt I started with two angled blocks on each site which will hold the side panels. You can see them in this picture. For the side panels I used pieces of luan plywood with the edges cut at an angle. At the end of each pieces of luan I attached a small piece of wood which will be used to hold the styrene for the curved ends. I also put angled wood blocks in the middle of the ends to help hold the styrene.

Here I have attached the skirt frame to the bottom of the body. I decided not to try to build the skit as an independent assembly, once it’s attached it won’t be coming off.