3 Day Weekends are meant for Projects! Part 1

The Dome has arrived!

Yes, I am sure you are all just excited as I am. The Dome has arrived! This is probably the most significant part of the entire build! And definitely the most recognizable.

I opened this bad boy up as soon as I had the chance. Included was the Outer Dome, Inner Dome, Mounting Ring, and the Support Ring. I also needed the Rockler bearing, but as mentioned in a prior post, I already had this part ordered a while ago.

Pictured below is the Outer Dome, Mounting Ring, Rockler bearing, and the complete bearing assembly including Mounting Ring, Rockler bearing, and Support Ring.

The details on the features is incredible!

The Inner Dome is essentially the same as the Outer Dome, but is designed to house all the fasteners attaching all the different parts, motors, servos, etc. required to move the dome, but keeps them hidden under the Outer Dome.

Mounting Ring.

Finally, the Rockler Bearing shows itself!

The Support Ring is the "Peace Sign" shaped part. This allows for mounting of motors and other electrical parts for convenience.

Everything went together fairly smoothly, with one exception. The Inner Dome was not cooperating and I could not get it on top of the Mounting Ring in its designated groove. This will require so extra modifications to the Inner Dome and/or Mounting Ring so that I can get them to fit. Will save that for another day since this is all just a test fit up.

Once I verified all the mounting parts were good to go, I moved on to preparing for finishing the domes. Received out of the box, the domes will have some extra material around the cuts from the laser machining process, so Step 1 was for me to remove all this.

Before. This was present on about 50% of the cuts on both domes.

This stuff is pretty sharp and will actually cause the Inner and Outer Domes to bind up when trying to put them together, so it's important to remove all this material before trying that. Luckily, I recently purchased a nice dremmel tool which made grinding out all these rough spots a breeze.

After. Not to worry about the appearance; all this is on the inside of the Domes and won't be seen.

Once everything was all cleaned up, I fit up the domes. They fit almost perfect, a bit off on some of the cutouts, however this is not too much of a problem. The last item I had on the schedule for today was to fit up the Radar Eye Mount I had finished in a previous post.

The locating holes for this piece on the Inner Dome only, so I needed to fit up the domes, and mark on the Outer Dome these locations so that I could drill them out. A few minuted later, and I had the Mount all fit up. Aside from some minor hardware issues that will be addressed later, it all fit up well.

Well whattya know, that looks pretty good! R2's starting to take shape! You can see I also fit up the FLD mounts. Perfect!

Up next will be a lot of painting on the domes, stay tuned!