Hey all, just wanted to document my progress on my AP armor build. I picked this set up from a fellow astromech builder a few weeks ago and I'm not sure if he had purchased straight from AP or secondhand. The first thing I did was double check to make sure everything was there, and it all looked complete.
Compared to working with aluminum R2 parts, the plastic is extremely easy. Plus, this forum had so many good pictures and tutorials, I always had another point of reference for each part I worked on.
The first thing I did was trim all the armor. I did this in about three days hoping to get it done for an event.
To trim, I marked many hard-to-see seams with a pencil. I was pretty conservative with my marks; its always best to cut too little than too much.
Once the lines were marked, I scored them with a knife. My favorite knife is a folding thingy from Lowes. It came with lots of replacement blades that can be swapped out in about 3 seconds. After I scored all the lines, I used a dremel to cut up to it and make snapping off the extra easy.
This gave me a pretty nice rough-cut... now all I had to do was clean it up. I have plenty of sandpaper in various grits laying around. Always kept a few pieces handy depending on the application.
Rinse and repeat all over the place!
Here is a pic of all the scraps trimmed off. It fills the bottom of a 20x20x20 box. These pieces were great for testing glues and epoxies though.
Much more to come.