Pocket Vent woes, skin fixing, power couplers paint results and Side Vents epoxied

Well it was one of those days.

One step forward, three backwards. Or so it felt.

First thing this morning, I put the front pocket vent up against the skin and wondered how much material I would have to remove from either. It looked like the best method would be to file material off the skins. (Newer versions of the skins are corrected to fit, coincidentally, the corrected version of the pocket vents.)


So, while very noisy, I filed away at the front skins to remove material for the pocket vent to fit smoothly into the skin. I was pretty excited that everything was fitting so nicely that I even broke out the silicone and applied it to all four edges of the pocket vent, thinking this would mount really nicely.

Then, as I pushed the vent into the skins, I noticed that the skins had seperated along one side of the pocket vent cut out. The vibration of the filing seperated the 3M 77 adhesive I used to adhere the skins years ago.

So now I had my hands full of drying silicone. I quickly cleaned up the pocket vent, skins and myself. It just seems that these skins are not meant to stay white.

Pictured below, the "widened" pocket vent cutout in the front skin...

...and below, I put in a lot of Super Glue under the skin area that seperated then clamped it then left it to dry.

While that was drying, I assembled the rear pocket vent now that the blue paint was dry.


Since I was already feeling down, I was hoping that the power couplers would have at least come out nice. Not really. I'm not terribly impressed with the liquid latex at all. I don't have any smooth edges and if you blow up the picture, you'll see my angst.

I've pretty much decided to leave it as it is. R2-D2 is a pretty beat up looking fella in real life, so if a few specks of blue aren't perfect, that's fine. After the issues I am already facing, an imperfect blue paintjob isn't something I'm up to frett over.


And finally, another area I had wanted to get to is my mis-aligned coin slots in the front skins. I was going to file those out but didn't want to cause any more skin damage today. Best left to another day!


However, there was one success story. Rather than overthink how to get the old-style side vents together, I just ran with an idea. I simply mixed up some JB-Qwik and bonded the sides together. I went rather heavy so there's no way those fellas are coming apart. I'm going to review how other have attached them to their skins, or attached them to the sides of the frame.


My other goal was to get the rear skins going.....but after all of this drama, I decided to go mow the lawn. Pick your battles, you know?