Today I decided that I wanted to clear coat the skins with a glossy finish so when people put their hands on him I can clean him off easier. I unscrewed the skins and got out a bunch of the other smaller parts because I also wanted to sand down the backs of some of the resin pieces. As you can tell my ADD kicks in with each new day of construction which, I guess, can come in handy when you have so many different directions you can go at any given time.
I started with the rear skins and did one coat of crystal clear gloss. Meanwhile, I also started sanding off the backs of some of the leg pieces. When the resin is poured into the mold for these pieces the back is facing upwards because the back of a piece does not usually matter. To put the piece in the body of the droid the back does not matter as it sits within the skin, but the pieces that go on the legs have to be seated flush up against the leg. This means that any excess lateral needs to be sanded off. It is an easy task if you have a belt or orbital sander, which I fortunately have.
After sanding was done and the second coat of clear coat was applied to the rear skins, I started checking on how I was going to paint the octo ports and exhaust ports. They both need to have some details in red and in chrome. As I stated in an earlier post, the chrome paint and the iodized red do not mix and actually react with each other. I cannot paint the piece in one of the colors and then paint over other parts with the remaining color. It eats the paint up. As I was checking about the colors to paint those ports, I discovered mistake #232 (not really, but it feels that way :)
The skins, that I painted and glued together already, had a section that was supposed to be red not the white that I had already painted it. The vent housing is supposed to be the color of the droid and I hadn't noticed that when I was painting everything. While looking for pictures of the ports, I noticed that the vents area was blue for R2-D2. A quick tape job around the rectangle and laying paper on the rest of the front skin and I was good to go. Luckily, the clear coat can be applied when the base colors are still wet. When the red was semi dry, I ripped off the paper and started applying the clear coat.
Thats when mistake #233 occurred. The paper that I had taped down on the skins had not covered one small area by the shoulder and when I applied the clear coat I saw little specks of red splattered there. I quickly ran to get a paper towel and when I wiped it off some of the red came with the clear coat. I sprayed more clear coat on it and wiped again to get the rest of the red. I couldn't believe that it worked. Then, I went back to applying the clear layer correctly and all was good. Crisis averted.
On a secondary note, I also applied a brown stone paint to my gaffi stick and it is looking great also. More work tomorrow, maybe I will get the legs completed.
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