Episode II: a new droid

I couldn't resist to write such a title, sorry! 

The sanding process of my R2 unit is a really long task, so I wished to find something else to make while not working on that project.

I thought to try to design a droid from the Star Wars universe, but it should have been something "new", something that no one had already tried to make by 3D printing. My choiche was a TT-8L doorkeeper from episode VI.

The droid design is almost complete and I already started to print and assemble it.

For this first post on this new droid I will start with the eye description. This is the only non printed part as it would have been too difficult to get a really good part with this technique.

After a few days of research I found a quite nice solution: a big Xmas ball filled with acrylic diamonds!

This is the ball:

It's a big ball, 14cm diameter and you can use just half of it as it's split into two halves already. It's almost perfect for my project.

For the filling I chose acrylic diamonds that are usually put on wedding tables as a decoration. Of course you need a lot of them...

These diamonds are the biggest that I found, about 2cm and they make a nice effect inside the ball:

Last step was to design the "iris" of the droid, using the ball size to set the inner diameter.

The result is quite nice and really similar to the original droid seen in the movie. In future posts I will show you the progresses with this new droid.