Blue ring and pie panels

So for the past 4 or 5 days, I've been trying to figure out what the best way was to glue the blue ring to the dome.

If my outer dome had fit better, I wouldn't have needed to use all the clamps I did, and could have started the right way, by attaching the base ring to the inner dome, gluing on the blue ring, then gluing on the outer dome.

Instead I had to do it backwards, and wound up with the blue ring loose with everything else attached. I asked over on the Astromech boards and heard a few novel ideas, but none that would work with everything already assembled.

Finally last night I sucked it up and did something about it:



You can see the blue tape intended to keep the paint from chipping, and the piece of scrap behind the ring to keep me from cutting too far, and the tape behind the scrap to keep the scrap from scratching the dome more than necessary...



Here's the cut...not very pretty, or straight. The bright side was, that by the time the edges were filed straight, enough slack was taken out of the ring for a near perfect fit:



The silicon dries clear, and will be cleaned up this afternoon. I just wanted to make sure I had enough behind the ends so that they wouldn't pop loose.

After getting that going, I thought "Hey, now I can do other stuff on the dome"...and the dome topper and the pie panels went on:





Now I'm excited, and can see the dome being finished possibly this weekend :)

I'm actually debating taking half a day off work to get a head start on cleaning up the blue ring, installing the other HPs, logics and radar eye, and gluing the rest of the panels on. After that, it's just a matter of wiring up the JEDI display system.

I think I'm gonna make it...