Posted on February 3rd 2022, 4:51 am
It's been 7 years since I made the decision to start down the path of building my own astromech droid. Back in 2015, and honestly countless times since, I've been annoyed with myself with how much time I spend doom scrolling on social media or watching TV. I wanted to make something or do something that was unique and allowed me to learn new skills. Enter a video I watched on the YouTube channel "Tested" by Adam Savage, the former Mythbusters host. This video featured the R2-D2 Builders Club, and I was intruiged. This was exactly the type of project that would fill this need. So I started looking into it.
Turns out it has a lot of options. You can build with styrene, wood, or aluminum. Naturally wanting the real deal, I decided I wanted an all aluminum droid. Great, except that means it's quite an expensive undertaking. But hey, I thought...it didn't have to be a quick project. In fact, I wanted something that would take a long while. Years sounded good to me. So I went with it.
I started by joining astromech.net and putting my name down for an aluminum frame. Since then I've acquired parts very slowly and have started to get to the point where I have something that's beginning to resemble a droid. I suspect that by the end of 2022, I'll have something somewhat functional, which is amazing to say.
7 years may seem like a long time, and it is, but not so much in this hobby. Time ranges for building droids can be anywhere from a couple of years all the way up to 10+ years. One big problem for me though is that in the time since I started building, there was a revision in the club standards which resulted in me having a legacy frame, but now there being this slightly tweaked design with some different component sizes. So most of the new parts were being made with that new CS:R spec. That means finding the parts I need will be harder.
I have been meaning to post build updates for a while, and I haven't gotten to it until now. So watch here for more news on that front. In the meantime, if you want to see some photos of my build, there's a photo album on my photos page. Hop over there to see a bit of what things look like.
Stay tuned for more updates.