Hi friends.
Currently I continue with the painting process. Yesterday I painted the blue areas of the robot's head and was very careful to get the color as close as possible to the blue color of the fabric that I used for the leg covers. The final color is a mix of 85% Vallejo Medium Blue and 15% White. I'm making the chipped paint effects by scraping the blue paint with a metal tool.
For this type of projects I use the 3D Google SketchUp application to help me. First I build all the pieces in that application and that helps me define their shapes, sizes and to see how they fit together. In this project, as it has so many joints, it was very useful to see how they connect with each other and how the movement of one affects the others.
Going back to the beginning of my project, I will tell you how I have made some of its most significant parts.
When I propose a scratch project, I always start by making a piece that seems to me to have some difficulty. If the result seems good to me, it serves as an incentive and encourages me to face the project with greater conviction and enthusiasm.
The first piece I made was one of the six fingers. In the images you can see that first finger with some metal parts that I finally replaced with plastic parts. My initial idea was to make a silicone mold to reproduce the six fingers in resin, but the truth is that this process is quite uncomfortable for me and, since I had plenty of time at that time because I was confined at home due to the pandemic, I finally decided make them all in plastic. I needed six fingers, but I did seven to be able to discard the one that seemed worse to me. The discarded finger was very useful for testing the paint and aging finishes before applying them to the model.
The phalanges of the fingers are thick pieces (4.5 mm) that have a specific curvature. To make them, I glued some strips of styrene (2 + 0.5 + 2 mm) and made a wooden template. The template forces the plastic to take that curvature and then I heat it in my kitchen oven so that that shape is permanently fixed.
I also used this process for other pieces that are marked with blue arrows in the following images.
I made the fork of the phalanges with 1 mm aluminum because those six joints support the weight of the entire model and it was necessary for them to be resistant.
The head also has difficulty because all its faces are curved. First I made a solid head in wood and I was making continuous corrections trying to get the most exact shape. Once I was happy with the result, I made a frame for each side using a thick and fairly rigid cardboard, enough for a few uses. A 1.5 mm styrene sheet is inserted into these racks and heated in the oven until it is sufficiently soft. It is then removed from the oven and pressed onto the corresponding face of the wooden head. The plastic cools quickly and the shape and curvature of that face is captured.
When I had all the faces of the head, I carefully cut the pieces and glued them together to get the final plastic head. The joints of these pieces are reinforced on the inside with a plastic rib to achieve a larger joint surface. In addition, I also applied a thick cord of epoxy resin adhesive on all the joints. The head was thus very strong and resistant.
This is all for now. I hope you like the project and that my explanations are useful to you.
Greetings.
Rafa