More work to the R&J dome

In preparation for the New England Get together, I went down a day early to have a day of building at Kevin Helmig's place. His shop can only be described as Mecca for R2 building. It has all those wonderful tools us amateur builders drool over at the hardware store!

One thing I really wanted to work on is my R&J dome. Its from one of the original batches having originally been owned by Jason (the 'J' in R&J). It has really deep spin lines and I've literally been working on it for years.

Last fall I finally went and took 60 grit sandpaper to the deepest lines, all near the panels. My concern has been cleaning up the area between the panels.

Before packing up to head to Kevin's, here's how the dome looked....note the rough look to the dome near the panels from the 60 grit...


Using a mouse sander (which works a lot better than an orbital sander), here's the dome after some 80 grit...

Now some 120 grit...

Now some 220 grit (that's the highest grit you can find for mouse sanders...elbow grease from here on in)...

Wet sanding with some 600, then on to 800....

I had really hoped to be spending my time at Kevin's cutting up the inner dome but opted to get this thing cleaned up. Its close...depending on which version of R2-D2 you like. Its starting to get shiney and reflective, so on to more 800 grit, 900 and such.

The 300mm domes do not need all this labor, they are pretty much perfect out of the box!