WALL•E Build Day at Mike's

What is a WALL•E building post doing in Victor's R2D2 Building Diary? (And before you ask: No, I am not building a WALL•E.) I'll work an R2 angle in before the end of this posting.

Michael McMaster came to town to work on WALL•E building with Mike Senna, and I came by to help. Michael inspected Mike's handiwork to date.



I was put to work to help with the gears, which are made from 3/4" Delrin. First, I needed to cut the Delrin into squares on the table saw.



Three WALL•Es worth (two for Senna, one for McMaster), 12 gears total.



Next, I screwed down the gear template that Mike and Michael made earlier from a similar piece of material, to use as a template for routing.



Before routing, Mike's friend Mark cut the corners off of each Delrin square, using the band saw. Lots of cutting corners.




I took the resulting piece of Delrin to the router, and used the flush-cut bit to cut the Delrin to match the MDF template.




I then drilled a 1/2" hole in the center, for the future motor shaft.



Repeat 11 more times.



Mike and Mark cut keyways into the center hole, using Mike's keyway cutting tool.



A square piece of keystock locks the shaft to the Delrin gear, much like how the Senna R2 drivetrains work.



Meanwhile, Mike and Michael molded a few of their scratch-built parts.





There were other miscellaneous WALL•E building activities as well. I sanded a lot of resin parts of Mike's that he had previously molded and casted, and Michael worked on the screen on the front part of WALL•E.

I told the guys that since this had nothing to do with R2 building, this wasn't going on the blog. They told me it had to, so as a total cheat, Roy Powers and Michael McMaster ended up looking at pictures of my R2 build on my iPad as I was leaving for the night. That was the extent of any R2 involvement. I don't think you can stretch the definition of R2 building much further than this.