Time to start building a Lego BB-8

Well, ordering ELEVEN THOUSAND Lego bricks (plus a few extras) takes a while. In the meantime I wanted to make a little helper template. The inside of BB-8 needs to be hollow so that our "hamster" robot can drive the body. So that means smooth. This Lego brick jig helps fill the void so that I can make sure I'm not invading the interior space when I build the model.  We have a digital file, but this helps reduce the errors.

 

It has a bunch of eyes because I needed flat tiles, after all, I don't want the panels to stick to the jig.  And eyes were cheap on "The Lego Wall" at the local Lego Store.



Initial jig for BB-8 interior shape.

Originally I was just going to do one quarter and mirror it, but decided that was too awkward, so I built another half.  The ordered Lego brick hadn't arrived, but I did have some loos brick.  Enough to do a few layers before I ran out of brick.

Start of the first edge of "Panel 3" of BB-8.

Eventually we got more brick and I could build more.  Different bricks are in different boxes, and basically the build area is a huge mess... I'd rather build than organize :)

BB-8 Build area.

Here's a closer view of the panel half built.  The jig is visible here, I didn't build the whole thing since the 2nd half is just a mirror.  You can see that there's a purple inner sphere in the digital model too, serving the same purpose: to keep the real shell model from invading into the interior of the sphere.

Jig and BB-8 building area

Of course I started more as soon as the first bricks started arriving, which meant that I ran out of the bits needed for the corners and had to stop.