And so it begins..........

What you see here is the beginning of my first Astromech. This is a wood frame from Mike Hendricks and Fiberglass skins from Brett Landon. This picture is the unveiling of it at Mike Senna's home in prep for the C4 builders room in Los Angeles, California in March of 2007.
This was the culmination of several months of travel from coast to coast while I was doing consulting works for various hospitals to determine how I would first start this process. My goal here is to make a fully RC'd droid. An R2D2 and a R5D4.
In order to make him suitable we have to add legs.....sounds easy..... but how to go about it and what needed to occur was very interesting. Mike Senna was very gracious to assist me in making this mount and hubs to attack my legs.
What I did was go to Home Depot and get 2 pieces of black pipe and floor flanges. The pipe diameter was (1) 1/2" and (1) 3/4" with their corrosponding floor flanges. I also got 2 electrical grounding clamps (those help to control lateral or sway movement of the pipes).
There is a weld beed the length of the 1/2" pipe, You will need a grinder to grind down that beed so the 1/2" pipe can fit inside the 3/4" pipe. I would also suggest you "key" that pipe to minimize the internal rotation or slippage of a telescoping pipe.
You then take 2 wood disks that are 6 1/4" in diameter and attach those disks to the floor flanges. That wood disk is then attached to the legs you will be using. When this is done, lay the legs down on an level/flat surface and drill 2 holes at the far end of each pipe to insert bolts through both pipes to keep them from slipping internally.
Once that is done, you will need to add JB Weld to the pipe threads to keep the pipes from unscrewing from the pipe flanges.
An important note here. Make sure you clean the pipe flange and the pipe threads of all grease, dirt etc with Varsol or lighter fluid or some other non-residue cleaner BEFORE adding the JB Weld. Let it sit all night, depending on the temperature of where you are doing this, it might help to put a blow torch to the JB Weld areas to aid in setup as you do not want this stuff coming loose when your droid is moving about. Heat helps JB Weld cure faster and more thoroughly.