I’d finished building my CNC router the year before and had made a number of simple projects projects. Then in early summer of last year my younger son and I were talking about what we could make his girlfriend for Christmas. We had just seen the episode of MythBuster’s where they made a full size TaunTaun and thought that would be hilarious. Of course, once we priced out the foam and furry fabric we’d need we realized that was a little (a lot) beyond reality.
Then one of us came up with the idea of a life-sized R2D2. Having some experience with building things with fiberglass from when I built my airplane, this didn’t see too difficult. I found the Astromech.net forums where they had detailed blueprints and tons of other great info on making a to-scale R2D2, including motorizing them. We decided creating a working R2D2 was a little impractical but we came up with the idea of redesigning it into a cabinet.
We started by using my CNC router to cut the dome out of 2″ thick rigid foam insulation and then laid up fiberglass over the top. The body was similarly constructed, with layers of C-shaped foam rings with 1/2″ MDF layers for the bottom and middle shelves and a stiffening ring at the base of the dome. With the dome in place we laid up more fiberglass around the body foam and overlapped it with the head. We then coated it with a filler and sanded it smooth.
The legs, feet and door panel are mostly MDF pieces cut to shape on the CNC router. There were also many, many parts that make up all the various details and components, many of which are made from 2 to 10 or more individual pieces. As I was finishing up I started counting all the individual pieces I made and was well over 200.
In the last few weeks before Christmas we started painting. The paint colors are a very good match to the actual R2D2 colors, although painting was a very big effort. Taping the blue and silver areas on the dome took many hours in part because rectangles on a domed surface are actually curved and don’t make square corners. To get the silver to have the right metallic look we actually painted all those areas bright yellow then topped it with the silver paint. For a little while it was looking like a giant minion!
The finished R2 is to scale, standing a little more than 42″ high, with a body diameter is just over 18″ and a total weight of about 60 pounds.
