Lucas visits the droid room

From shortly before10 a.m.

CVI opens

Doors opened

Setup

Wednesday was setup day for CVI. The R2-D2 Builders Club used Dock 11. Each vehicle had 20 minutes to unload, so from 9 a.m. through early afternoon builders drove in, parked at the dock and hauled complete droids and piles of parts into the convention center, across the main exhibit floor and into Room 215. Unpacking droids is an exciting time at a "Star Wars" convention. People who haven't met in a year or two years or ever suddenly recognize each other, and early in the day people greet each other even under the pressure of honoring the 20-minute rule. One of the room organizers, Guy Vardaman, joked at one point that the room needed less greeting and more signing in so the room volunteers could get their early access passes and "staff" lanyards. I had met many of the people in the room at CV in 2010 and at DroidCon in 2011, so I had a chance to see their progress. One man from Indianapolis, John Flack, has been working on his R6 droid for seven years. At Celebration V, it consisted of a wooden frame, legs and not much else. At DroidCon, John had his droid walking, a feat he had achieved only a day or two before the gathering. Here at CVI, his droid has the beginnings of a head and skins he had put on in the past week. There was less to do overall than at CV and more for me to do personally because of my own progress in two years. My droid is far closer to completion than it was two years ago, so I spent -- an hour? half an hour? -- attaching the legs to the frame, installing the two 12-volt batteries, connecting the motor wires to the Sabertooth 2 x 25 speed controller, connecting the servo wires and attaching the skins before dropping the dome into place. After finishing my own droid, I helped detail the Midwest Robots club's replica of Jabba's palace door with sand. I'm a member of the group, but most of its builders are in Omaha, so I had to just watch the set piece come together through Internet posts. Today I picked up a small bag of sand and spread the sand along the piece's ledges to represent the blown sand on Tatooine. That's enough for now. I'm on the first shift in the room Thursday morning.

My droid ready for CVI to start

Room 205 in the convention center this afternoon:

More CVI setup

At Celebration CVI for setup

After setting up my droid, I helped put sand on the Midwest Robots set piece of Jabba's palace door.

Fixing the radar eye lens

I've been working for the past several months to get my droid ready for Celebration VI. Remember this little guy at Celebration V?

Two wooden legs constructed by the builder and his father, with wooden and resin detail parts. One styrene dome with two coats of Tamiya Silver paint and a couple of layers of clearcoat but no radar eye, no lights and with panels and a single holoprojector held in place by silicone. One A&A frame, reinforced. Two resin utility arms.

Two years later, he'll be ready for CVI. Today I worked on several projects. One easy project with highly visible results (that's low cost, high yield) was fixing the radar eye lens. Several days ago, I placed the lens as-is into the space left for it in the radar eye and put silicone around it to hold it in place. The problem was that from the back the lens protruded beyond the back of the radar eye. This might be because I bought the lens and the eye several years apart. It would be impossible to fasten the radar eye flush against the dome because the back of the lens would be in the way. The lens also didn't sit as close to the front of the radar eye as it should; anyone peering into the eye would see a gap.

One solution would be to cut a hole in the dome large enough to accommodate the oversized lens. Eventually I'll want to do this -- and to replace the opaque screen-accurate lens shown above with a translucent bronze-colored one that is meant to work with a camera behind the dome. Eventually, I'll want to use that other lens and have a camera in my droid. But it won't happen in three weeks. Besides, that wouldn't fix the problem with the gap visible from the front.

Instead, I took the lens over to the belt sander and, over the course of about 20 minutes, gradually sanded down the edge until it fit into the hole flush with the back of the radar eye. The process took so long because I kept rotating the eye and because I had to stop every minute or so to let the material cool down (I burned myself on the heated resin a few times. Ouch.)

Eventually, the lens more or less fit. I filed the rough spots and came up with this:

What next? With many other parts, I'd use silicone. But the lens sat almost perfectly flush with the rear of the eye, so I decided to use painter's tape to hold it in place until I mounted the eye onto the dome.

From the front it looks like this:

And on the dome it looks like this: