Fusion furnace - 2

At last the fusion furnace is complete! The 3D printable parts are on thingiverse and can be freely downloaded of course.

In this post I will put some instructions to build the furnace, so it will be a bit long. Note that almost everything is 3D printed. You just need some nuts and bolts, some tubes and a couple of connectors (of course also glue, putty, sandpaper and paint).

At the bottom of this post you will find links to the non printable parts and to the models on thingiverse.

Let's start with the printing tips...

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!

The lift system - 2

Finally I managed to test the lift system with the periscope. I was a bit worried because the periscope is much heavier than the life scanner, so the servo and the gears could not be enough to lift it.

The body - 1

Well, this will be the most intensive part of the whole droid. The body is made up of several different parts to be printed and most of them needs 3-4 hours of printing (sometimes more).

Anyway the building is a quite linear task, so there should be no problems or at least they should be really few. 

My only concern is about ABS warping. With the new printer and the enclosure this has been quite reduced, but still visible in the biggest parts. I will surely need to make some post printing fixes...

That's what I have done until now...

The dome - 1

The "easiest" part to print of this R2D2 is the dome. It's made up of several pieces that must be printed, glued together, sanded and painted. As I wrote in the introduction, there is a long post produtcion work to do if you want a good loking Astromech...