Fusion furnace - 1

I finished printing the body a couple of months ago, but now the droid is on hold. The body needs heavy sanding, priming and painting and I cannot do this inside my house, so I need a better weather to go on.

Anyway I am still developing something about this droid and after a bit of research I decided to build a replica of the fusion furnace seen in ep.V on Dagobah. I think you will agree that a droid is almost useless without a good recharging unit!

I watched a lot of frames from the movie and also photos of other replicas from the fans. After a while I could have been quite confident to have enough good measures and details to start a design.

Printing this model is easy. Also assembling is not too difficult. The only issue I found was on the tubing system.

There are two different sets of tubes in the design: 8 small black tubes in the base and 8 bigger tubes from the top to the bottom of the model.

For both I tried some simple silicon tubes (those usually used for small aquariums). They were perfect for the small ones, but the bigger tubes could not get the right curves, no matter what I did.

So, to have better tubes I decided to just print the bigger ones and I must admit I am really satisfied of the result.

Other features are:

• empty inside to fill with lamps or leds, to simulate the powering
• thin white screen as a diffuser for the inside light
• two real connectors to get power inside and eventually trasfer it to the droid

Of course many more things can be added like for example something to make the buzzing sound during the recharge.

Here you can find some photos of the building process. Note that this is not finished yet as I still need a bit of sanding and the final painting.

This is the top after a first priming and with some stucco where needed. You can also see some of the greebles, but they are still not glued in place. The wire is just a test to measure the length of the copper wire that I will use in the finished model.

For the final wires I used 1mm copper wire. About 90cm for every spring and manually winded using a pen.

Just a bit of manual forming and then I inserted the wires in place. Nice! In the second photo you can also see two of the printed tubes in place (still to be glued of course).

This is a detail of the printed tubes where they connect to the base. Also one of the real connectors is visible in the bottom.

This is where I am now. As I wrote above, the model needs more sanding and of course a good painting, but I should get it complete in few time. I will make a second post about the furnace to show you the final model and of course all of the printable files and a list of the extras will be available in the same days.