Not happy with just having an R2D2, I’ve decided to also build a BB8. 🙂
The BB8 Builders Club is an offshoot of the R2 Builders Club, with many of the same members, and have kindly produced a brilliant set of 3d printer files to allow anyone to print out their own BB8.
Of course, for this I needed a 3d printer (or rather, another one). I’ve had a few printers up to this point with the last one being bought just over a year ago from ebay. However, none of them had really been any good and took way too much fiddling with to get even half decent prints out of. In November 2017 I took the plunge and preordered a Prusa i3 Mk3. This arrived at the start of Feb, and with a slight build issue that Prusa sorted out quite rapidly, I was ready to start printing.
As a side note, I can’t recommend the Prusa enough. Its a high quality printer, designed by one of the main members of the reprap project, and copied by just about every other cheap chinese printer out there. The official one is leagues ahead of any other sub £1000 printer, with auto bed levelling, brown out detection, no endstops needed, and a great support infrastructure.
So with the printer working, I started printing out the first BB8 parts. Currently, the plan is to get the dome finished before I even start thinking about the main sphere and if I’m going to make him radio controlled. The printer was running nearly constantly for a week, and I managed to get all the main parts of the dome printed without any major hassle or wasted filament.
The printing is, however, the easy part. Next comes a lot of sanding, gluing, filling, sanding, painting, a bit more sanding, and finally the last bit of paint. There will also be a bit of electronics to go in the dome, tho I will be trying to keep that to a minimum so that it doesn’t weigh too much.
Just waiting for some warmer weather so I can work in the garage and continue on with this build. The build gallery can be found here: