It’s been almost two three years to the day since I last worked on my drinks tray. This may have something to do with BarBot happening this time of year. In fact it’s this Friday and Saturday in San Francisco, and Grant and I will be there with Artoo. Last time we made do with grey primer but I couldn’t let another year go by without doing it more justice.

I finally added some gold paint to finish it off. Well, as finished as it’s ever going to be. I got tired of filling and sanding all the layers that it’s made up from. The outer one’s are pretty smooth but the inner groves aren’t perfect.

Paint is Rustoleum Metallic Gold on top of white primer. I was hoping to get a more red-ish gold color, but selection at Home Depot is limited. It has a hint of red in it and is more yellow in person – which is what I wanted. This metallic has a tendency to sputter and drip, so be careful.

Should be pretty easy to get it reassembled and I may throw on some weathering to bring out the detail.

Related:

• Drinks Tray
• BarBot 2010
• BarBot 2010 News Video

I made a start on my ROTJ drinks tray, it’s based on the A&A plastic kit.

I still need to add some detail, finish filling/sanding and apply the final gold paint, but it’s almost done. There was a lot of Bondo work to hide the layer lines on the glued parts.

We used it on Matt’s R2 at the BarBot event the other night. We had problems with glasses flying off while driving around, so I’ll may need to find some small glasses to bring along next time that will fit in the recesses.

I also made a start on a drinks dispenser, I was being overly ambitious trying to get something done for the event, but got a lot of the detail sketched out on how I’ll build it.

Plan right now is to use a sucker cup thing to hold it on the dome, instead of opening the top hatch, which would be hard for me to re-work and open on the current dome. I may make a fake hatch to attach somehow.

Another problem with the drinks dispenser is that on a 3 legged droid the whole dome tips back the assembly, compared to on the original that was on a 2 legged vertical R2. So some adjusting will be needed to get the setup to work w/o leaning too much into the drinks tray.

Related:

BarBot 2010 – DNA Lounge SF