Star Wars: Building The Probe Droid From The Empire Strikes Back #starwars #diorama #3dprinting

I'm the Scale Model Geek and in this video I head back to the original Star Wars trilogy with this awesome looking probe droid. Out of all the thousands and billions of droids that they have in that universe this is actually one of my favorites. Ever since I saw it in the movie The Empire Strikes Back I've always wanted to build this thing and look it only took me 40 years but hey finally getting around to it. Even though this 3D print looks pretty awesome sadly it's missing a bit of detail. I will need to add a few greeblies here and there you know the old Star Wars tradition that we do with kits and then hopefully it'll be even more interesting than it is now. As usual just a bit of preparation sanding out some of the printing lines in this making sure it all fits nice and tight and I'm just using some of this rod to create the support strut in the middle between the body and the head that way I can still swivel the head around. There's two halves to the body the upper body the lower body how original is that and there's the head it's already looking pretty good. The probe droid does have a couple glowing sensors on it so I'll reproduce them with a couple of five millimeter LEDs. I have a clear LED which is a white light and I have a red LED which is a red LED. I start off by drilling a pilot hole and once I've got that as accurately as I could in the middle I then use a cylinder burring tool to expand the hole. I constantly test the LED to make sure it fits the hole I just don't want to make the hole too big and the LED has a bit of a lip right at the bottom so I needed to grind that off so the LED slid straight through. I was really happy with the fit I got in this it's a really nice tight fit very happy with it. Now soldering the wires on there it's really easy the short leg is the negative the long leg is the positive and then I covered the joints with some heat shrink tubing. A quick test and it worked first go. Just to make the painting process a little bit easier I painted around where the LED goes before I put in the LED and off camera I've already painted the top and the base black and then test fitting the legs there. I did need to do a bit of alterations a bit of sanding to make sure the legs fitted nice and tight and I held them together with a bit of super glue. I did need to experiment a bit try and work out where all the legs go because there's no instructions to this kit. I will be putting a support strut down the middle of the probe droid so I had to be very careful that when I place the arms slash legs whatever you want to call them I made I had to make sure that they didn't cross the center line or else I'm going to have a few problems and there it is all those articulated arms all done. The droid is looking better and better by the minute I'm liking it. Time to put the LED lights in now run it straight through the hole and using a bit of super glue to keep it into place and once the super glue was all dry I gave them a bit of a coat of liquid latex just to protect them from future painting. While I was checking out the reference material I noticed that the articulated arms actually have some hydraulic pistons so I jumped into the 3D software called Blender and created some and printed some up and just using a bit of super glue I glued them into place. I'm glad I added that detail because now they will look like they actually work look at that looking so good now look carefully at the body I've also added some greeblies off camera and they're just some random pieces out of my box of goodies and then with the magic of editing I sprayed them in black off camera I think what I loved about this droid was the fact it was so big black and menacing it just hovered above the surface looking for you and now onto the support strut now this is a leftover piece from the hovercraft build that I did a few months ago and it turned out to be the perfect size for the underside of the probe droid and to make sure I had a bit of strength in the support I used a brass rod off camera I filed the end of the brass rod just to rough it up make sure I get a bit of grip when I add this five minute epoxy adhesive to the joint I wasn't too worried about how neat I put the aerodyte in there because it's going to be a bit hidden in there anyway so you won't see much of it if any of it again off camera painted the whole thing white and then hit the connection joint disc thing with some flat black so now it's time to add a bit more painting detail and I'm going to dry brush the probe droid with this panzer gray from Ammo it's a dry brushing paint it's really thick and it works really great for this technique but you can't have it flat black because it's just flat you know it's lifeless and by doing this dry brushing it really brings out the detail with the gray dry brushing as I'm specifically hitting the raised edges of the probe droid and once I've done that gray pass I then head over to my field blue from Tamiya and I used a really thick paint at the bottom of the jar and I start dry brushing the flatter areas of the probe droid and I'm doing this just to add a bit of color variation and like I mentioned in every other video that I do all this is doing is creating a bit of visual interest and now it's time to add a bit more detail I'm using some of these Vallejo steel and this is for those hydraulic pistons or pneumatic pistons I have no idea what they are but they're silver now I'm using some of these off white from Vallejo and the probe droid has a couple cylinders of the side of the body now they are red but you can't paint red on black because it doesn't come out very red so you need to do the base color of white then add the red on top of that that way you get true reds and you don't end up with this really dark maroney reddy color with the painting all done on the probe droid it's time to glue the support strut to the base of the probe and the good old five minute aerodite comes into play once again that pops right in and I'll leave it for about an hour while I go on to other things like the base this is a piece of xps foam that I've cut to size here I'm just marking out an area for the battery compartment and I'll just cut out that section with a hot knife now you don't want to cut right through just deep enough for the battery compartment to hide in I then grab a bunch of scrap xps foam and just start gluing them onto the base to add a bit of visual interest to the terrain I'm just using pva glue or wood glue to adhere that all together and then using a hot knife I shape it to roughly where I wanted to be once the glue had dried and then off camera I just cover the whole thing with a really thin coat of plaster of paris by the way if you haven't already I would love if you smash that like button and subscribe to the channel your support will be greatly appreciated and like I just mentioned here is the plaster of paris and I did need to leave this overnight to dry I've also painted the edges with some flat black some cheap poster paints for that final finish of the snow terrain I decided to use some of this Vallejo snow and it's the first time I've ever used this stuff and the thing that jumped into my mind was how thick this stuff is and how brilliantly white it was and I gotta admit it was looking pretty good when I started putting it on getting a nice little texture out of it and it was looking like snow too but then I ran into a problem there was a huge air bubble in there and didn't look like I got much in the bottle I was kind of feeling ripped off right here this stuff was like 10 bucks a bottle and looking down the bottle I probably had maybe what a third of that of actual paint in there so I was kind of dismayed with this stuff but it was looking good and it was too late for me to go and try and get a refund or complain about it because I actually bought this a little while ago and how do you go in and say hey I've got a half a bottle of paint without them thinking you already used it up with the base all finished it was time to assemble all the components and I've twisted the end of the wires together just to help it feed through the brass tubing one thing I did forget to mention during the making of the base was I inserted a piece of styrene rod into that base and glued it in place this just gave it a bit more strength and support for the brass rod and with a bit of help from five minute aerodite once again I use that to hold everything together I left that for about an hour for the aerodite to harden and then proceeded to connect up the battery pack now the battery pack is three volt each led is three volts as well so I've connected them in parallel and I have two double-a batteries within the battery compartment and each battery is 1.5 volts which gives me my three volts and that battery holder just fits in perfectly nice and tight and then to hold into place I just use a bit of gaffer tape nothing specialized here for the final bit of this construction I'm using some of this 0.7 millimeter wire to create a couple of antennas to go on top of the probe droid now these antennas are retractable so it really doesn't matter to what size you cut it once I've done that I just dip the end into some uv resin and harden it with a uv torch and the more you dip it the bigger your little blob at the end becomes and a good old super glue to hold them into place that's a nice and easy cool detail to add to it and then a bit of flat black to finish off the antennas you may have noticed those shiny domes on the end they were just painted with a clear varnish a gloss varnish and with that it's all done thank you very much for sticking around to the end time for the hero video