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.
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| 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.
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| 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 :)
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| 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.
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| 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.
