II: Problems and Fixes: the De Ago/Fanhome R2

This page is part of a highly detailed review of “Build your own R2-D2,” a “partworks” kit designed and sold by De Agostini/Modelspace/Fanhome.

De Ago's R2

Like the De Agostini Millennium Falcon "partworks" kit, their R2-D2 is good and bad when it comes to screen accuracy. In terms of general proportions it's pretty close, and it's fairly mechanically sturdy. But specific details are almost all wrong, it's a random blend of ANH features and ESB features, and several key components look toylike and cheap. Given the high cost of the product, and given the fact that De Ago advertise the kit as being a “MOVIE-ACCURATE REPLICA”, this is disappointing.

It's sort of weird and depressing. It’s like they examined photos and blueprints really carefully, thought about the design at length, and then went away for a couple weeks. When they came back they drew up their plans based on memory, without relying on the stuff they'd just researched.

So much detail is kind of close, yet doesn’t match any prop from any movie. It feels kind of disdainful to the buyers of the product, to be frank. Each error is pretty minor, but the cumulative effect of virtually every detail being wrong just makes the whole thing a mess.

Here's a list of some of the visual problems with the kit, broken down into rough difficulty levels to fix.

The goal here is to try and make this kit look as screen-accurate to the radio-controlled (three legged) R2 unit from Star Wars/ANH (1977) as is reasonably possible. Obviously, there were variations in the movie prop droids, so this isn't some absolute goal or anything. But generally any change that makes the kit look less like a toy is a win in my book!

Note that, although there are differences between the various R2 props built for the first film, there was only one three-legged remote-controlled R2 built for the original Star Wars film. The rest were either two-legged R2 units for Kenny Baker to operate, two-legged shell units to drop and strap onto Landspeeders, and so on, and two-legged R5 units sort of bodged together to resemble a three-legged R2. The three-legged R2 did change throughout the course of filming, but aside from the addition of rivets on the body and the colours of the holoprojector rings and some panels, the changes aren't massive.

What’s the point?

Why make any of these mods anyway? Why aren't you happy with the DeAgo/Fanhome product as it ships?

Well, personally I'd rather watch a 70mm movie on a big screen in a theatre than watch it on a phone. And I'd rather have a model that resembles a movie prop than a children's toy.

That said, I don't cast any aspersions on anyone who bought this kit who doesn't want to mess around fixing this stuff! Many people are going to be super happy assembling the out-of-the-bag components, and building up a nice droid model, just as it ships from the factory. Maybe add a little weathering. And that's all fine. The point of making models is to have fun, not to tell other people what they should do with theirs!

So I'm probably going to try and implement most of the fixes in sections 1 and 2. Most of 3 and 4 is probably going to be too much of a pain to tackle, so I'm just going to leave that stuff. In particular I'm focusing on visual appearance issues, and less on mechanical/electronic performance issues.

1. Easy alterations

• • Strip, sand and polish the metal components. Removing the paint makes the parts look like the metal they are, and not silver-painted plastic. Sanding also removes any seams, and sharpens up the edges of the cast metal pieces to make them look more like the machined originals. It’s also goofy to note that there’s a faintly yellowish tinge to the metallic paint, so it matches the dome metal rather than the aluminium of the original props.

• • The white plastic "skin" for the main body cylinder, the legs, and feet, is made up of a bunch of smaller pieces that can be easily mailed. This means ugly and screen-inaccurate seams! Putty and fill all the cracks, gaps, and screw holes in the white parts of the model.

  • Speaking of putty, it's so aggravating that most of the white parts are screwed together with gapingly large visible screw holes. Holes filled with plastic plugs is the kind of engineering you see in 1980s clock radios. If only De Ago had designed the parts with hidden screws - accessible from the underside or interior. Especially the body screws near the shoulders. But no. Unfortunately, puttying the plugs will make it more difficult to open the unit for repairs if necessary.

  • Repaint white parts for consistency of colour. Because the white body panels and legs are manufactured at different times, their paint isn’t exactly the same. Also, the real R2s were metal or fibreglass painted white, giving them an opaque solidity. The De Ago pieces are white plastic with matte white paint, and thus maintain a very subtle translucency to them. That's another factor that contributes subliminally to the toylike look. I’ll probably repaint with a dark primer to eliminate this problem.

  • Repaint blue parts to give depth and transparency. Research paint options – the idea is to make it look as much as like raw aluminium metal with blue marker dye over top.

  • Paint silver plastic pieces to resemble metal as much as possible. Research metallic paints.

  • Replace the four under-shoulder "stabilizer" details with deeper and more accurate 3D-printed parts. I've made 3D-printed replacements. The real ones fit into a slightly deeper slot, and most if not all of the knurled cylinders are visible.

• • The octagon ports (described as "heat exhaust grilles" by De Agostini) are inaccurate. These features vary slightly from ANH to ESB, with the rear slat positions being the main differences. Most R2 versions have simple black-painted or black-taped lines representing the slats, and others have cut holes. However, the De Ago octagon port has shallow depressions for slats, with oddly rounded ends to them. The port as a whole is also shallower than the movie originals, which were actually fairly deep (the ports were about 1.25" deep on the actual movie props, so should be almost 14mm deep on the De Ago model, instead of 5mm).

  • Accordingly, replace the two octagon ports with  3D printed replacements. They should be deeper and have "layered" central posts. I've made 3D-printed replacements for shallow parts – still working on deep ones. It's not possible to make them of a correct scale depth unless you cut back the internal metal frame.

• • Move the loudspeaker from the power socket port to somewhere else. Maybe the front data port? (cut the back of the data port accordingly) That way sound will appear to be coming out of his head rather than his butt.

  • Replace the two round "power ports" with more accurate 3D-printed replacements. The De Ago ones are kind of flat where they should be angled. In progress.

• • The battery harnesses - the four silver bars on the front of the supposed battery packs on the feet - are unconvincing injection-moulded plastic with sink marks on the sides. They're also incorrectly designed, as they're flat-bottomed, rather than only attached at the top and bottom with a gap in between. The hinge section at the top is also poorly represented, again for moulding reasons. Finally they’re spaced too widely on the front. It’s easy to relocate them, but then you need to putty and fill the holes.

  • Replace the four "battery harnesses" with more accurate ones. I've made 3D-printed replacements.

• • File and sand the sides of the L-shaped ankle details to get rid of the angles caused by injection moulding draft. (ie: make the sides parallel)

• • Replace the coin slot/pushbuttons with 3D-printed replacements that have the correct dimensions and symmetrical angles. The De Ago buttons are angled in an asymmetrical fashion for no reason I can tell. In progress.

  • The holes in the horseshoes for the buttons and "hydraulic" details are modelled after the details seen on the fibreglass ANH droids. These have very rounded corners and are not horizontally centre-aligned, but are slightly closer to the outer edges of the shoe. By contrast the metal ANH droids have holes which have much sharper corners - almost to 90° – and which are centre-aligned. So the appearance of these details is actually screen-accurate on De Ago’s part, depending on which version of the droid you’re going for. Cut out the corners.

  • In another cost-saving measure, the three knurled holoprojector tips/nozzles aren't angled in enough, are too thick-walled, and are too long, which makes them look toylike. They also have too many ribs and don't have the correct profile at the base. The spherical outer holder is also way too thick-walled, and weren't painted silver - they were painted gloss grey.

  • This is a shame, as a thin-walled projector is seen extensively in the iconic "help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" scene and will be recognizable to many viewers. In the movies these projectors were reading lights from an old Vickers Viscount airplane (or castings thereof), and the Bakelite tips were thin-walled and tapered. Note that the De Agostini projector angle is fixed and not adjustable, and one of the two dummy projectors contains the microphone for speech recognition (and thus the clear lens has a hole in it, which looks pretty bad and also doesn't let in enough sound).

  • Replace the truly crappy front and rear holoprojectors with more accurate 3D-printed parts. Top one is more difficult to fix, because its surround is moulded into the metal pie plate (!). In progress.

  • The shoulder buttons on the real droids had two pieces - a larger cylinder piece and a smaller flattish cone-shaped piece, both taken from a Michell Transcriptor record player. The cone had straight sides. The De Ago metal piece has curved sides there, making it look more like a blob than a cone. Also, the two small holes in the flat top surface of the buttons are much too small and too shallow. Unfortunately you can't drill these little holes out to the correct size because it's hard to drill down into the metal and make a new centre point. I have chucked my shoulder buttons into an electric drill and used a file to straighten the sides of the cone-shaped piece somewhat. It’s hard going, but does look a bit better.

  • Remove the interior recesses for the buttons and hydraulics. That way I can build sharply edged replacement recesses which will look more accurate and be easier to paint as aluminium. I'll also angle the bottom of the the two top shoulder buttons so that they angle correctly. In progress.

• • On the subject of shoulder buttons, the De Ago is “button back”, which is correct for ESB but wrong for ANH. The all-metal ANH droids were actually button-front, and the fibreglass ANH droids were button-front on one leg and button-back on the other leg.

  • However if you want button-forward like most ANH droids (the De Ago R2 has many other ANH features, just not this one) then it’s modification time! Fortunately it's super easy to reverse the horseshoes - just cut out some holes in the intermediate plastic plate, and you're good to go.

  • The middle foot is missing the narrow trapezoidal details at the top. Luckily that's easily fixed – cut out a piece of styrene and glue it on.

  • The half-moon/curved protrusions on the top and bottom of the battery box are: a) the same height, and b) too narrow. The ANH and ESB boxes were symmetrical - the lower half-moon protrusion was taller than the top one.

  • The inner sides of the two battery boxes have details that are supposed to look like the ANH battery boxes. However, they got it wrong. I can see why, since good photos of this part of the foot are hard to come by. But basically they interpreted the inner details as having two rectangular panels, plus a slender raised cylinder. In fact, the ANH battery boxes for the three-leg R2-D2 had sheet metal rectangles screwed to them. A notch was cut at the bottom to allow the cylinder of the internal traction motor to protrude. De Ago therefore thought that the sheet metal plate was a panel, and they got the diameter of the motor wrong. Replace with a bent piece of sheet metal on each battery, plus make a new cylinder for the motor.

  • The small blue tabs sticking out of the L-shaped ankle details have curved sides. The original ones were straight sided.

  • Sand and repaint the lousy-looking plastic parts of the light sabre.

  • Scribe the outside edges of the panels so that they look like actual separate panels and not just recesses in a plastic skin.

  • Put some foil or paint on the inside of the battery boxes to light-block the motor assemblies' blue LEDs. May not be necessary if I paint the white pieces with grey primer first.

  • Weather the model. Just to a Tatooine ANH kind of level. Some folks seem to feel R2 should look like he's dripping with rust, like he's been at sea for the past 20 years. Come on - he should be dirty and beaten up, but not disintegrating and corroding!

2. Medium difficult alterations

• • Replace the dome's blue top panel (the round dome topper). This is because the silver ring is almost exactly twice the diameter it should be. A real drag, as the supplied topper is cast metal, and quite nice. In progress.

  • Fix the damn doors so they actually close properly. This involves cutting back the outer edges of the silver boxes, and really should not have been necessary!

  • Fix the excessive dome gap. The real R2s did have a slight visible gap, but less than the De Ago R2. Some people have fixed the problem by reversing the position of the three-armed bracket holding up the top rotation point, though doing so can interfere with the light sabre ejector – causing its wires to get pulled out.

  • Replace the rounded logic light surrounds with 3D-printed replacements. They should have sharp corners, not rounded, be angled inwards symmetrically, and have curved (cylindrical-surface) fibre optic panels. This will require trimming or filing the corners of the metal plate that holds the surrounds. In progress.

Note also that the silver lines on this panel are just silver paint. They were grooves on the original. That’s very difficult to fix since DeAgo used a metal plate.

• • Replace all the seriously screen-inaccurate manipulator arms which live inside the compartments. The three De Ago arms are supposed to represent the ANH manipulator arm used in the Dejarik/holochess scene, the ANH computer interface arm, and the ESB welding/hyperdrive fixing manipulator arm. The ANH manipulator arm is okay, but deviates in the details. The ANH computer arm has totally the wrong dimensions. And the ESB arm is oversimplified and has the wrong proportions. The parts are mostly silver and gold-painted plastic, and have mould part lines running along them. In progress.

• • Fill and detail the interior of the blue arms to more closely resemble the ANH arms. (the original arms were flat on the interior, but the tips were sort of cut to resemble nutcrackers or something)

• • Replace the top holoprojector, which involves cutting the pie plate. This will be a big pain to do right since it involves cutting and filing down a metal piece. In progress.

  • Give the replacement holoprojector tips chipped or damaged edges, as could be seen on the ANH droids.

• Add a 3D print to simulate the layered metal bits on the interior part of the shoulder details (inside curve of the horseshoes). In progress.

• Make the radar eye's lens deeper and rounder. Might not bother.

• File down the shoulders and legs to reduce the amount of visible draft. The original droids were metal or fibreglass  and had 90 degree angles to the sides. However, De Ago used inexpensive injection moulding, resulting in vertical sides that are angled out. This is one of those subtle things that results in a more toylike look, even if you can’t articulate why. There are also raised edges on some of the joins on the legs where there shouldn’t be any. This visible draft can be reduced through filing and sanding, but it’s difficult to eliminate it entirely without a ton of reworking of the plastics.

• The large data port at the top of the body barrel has incorrect dimensions. Also it should have nothing between it and the silver dome ring. De Ago have a white plastic strip above the port. Sigh.

• Make the rectangular pieces on the half-moons (the semi-circular details on the outside of the three feet) vertical, not tilted inwards.

• Widen the vertical spacing of the two horizontal grooves on the half-moons. The De Ago feet have ESB groove spacing, not ANH spacing, so this is a matter of preference and not overall accuracy.

• The De Ago half-moons are a strange mixture of ANH details (the height) and ESB details (the width of the gap between the grooves). However, since the bottom of the half-moons is roughly ANH height, they don't line up with the bottom of the flanking raised details at all (ESB height), so who knows what they were thinking.

• Move the on/off switch and power socket from the skirt to somewhere less visible and obvious. I'm thinking of turning an octagon port into an on/off pushbutton, and moving the power socket inside the small compartment (the way it's done in ESB on Dagobah).

• The supplied battery hoses look terrific material-wise - they’re actual braided copper - but they're thin and weedy. They're 4.5mm in diameter, and should be more like 6-7mm in diameter. That may not sound like much, but it does make a noticeable difference in appearance. I'm going to replace them with woven copper shielding. This isn't as tight as the De Ago stuff, but can be adjusted to a better thickness.

• Replace the plates and sockets into which the "battery cables" are shown to plug. The De Ago sockets are just white plastic tubes, making them look purposeless. The hoses should terminate in diamond-knurled metal nuts (brass for ANH; silver for ESB). In progress.

• Put more interesting and convincing details inside the cheap toylike compartment interiors. De Agostini's interiors are modelled after drawings that appeared in one of the droid books that came out a few years ago. The problem is that the De Ago plastic details just don't feel like they should do anything - they obviously just arbitrary random lines and recesses spraypainted silver. They basically look like the cheap "interior details" you'd see on 1970s toys. I'm almost surprised that they didn't include a coloured bit of printed paper underneath a clear plastic block, like the Six Million Dollar Man play figure. Compartment sides also bend inwards. Of course, no good photos exist of what the ANH droids actually had in there. I suspect most had nothing, except for the battle-damaged post-Yavin R2. Low-rez photos do exist of that droid, which had loose wires and electronics stuck in for that brief scene. I’ll probably model my interior parts after that.

It also doesn't help that De Ago got these drawings totally wrong. They seem to have thought that the big round thing on the left was a flat disc and not a socket for interchangeable tools, that the small round thing on the right was a raised detail and not a recessed power socket, and that the the ovoid with a cross was a grid-like thing, not the zapper tool from ROTJ seen end-on. Oh well.

• • Make the square/long rectangular recesses in the shoulders sharp edged, as they mostly were on the ANH droids, instead of rounded. Might skip this - it's time-consuming to do that sort of alteration neatly, and difficult not to screw it up.

  • Similarly the two front arm recesses (the zig-zaggy recesses for the blue arms on the front) have curved rounded corners. The actual movie props had much sharper corners. Again, is it worth the hassle to fix this? Maybe - the soft corners are noticeably toylike. A bigger visual problem, and really difficult to fix if you want to maintain working arms, is that the top blue arm is not vertically aligned in its frame as it should be - argh.

  • Fix the battery enclosures so they look like metal boxes, and not screwed-together plastic toys with plugs roughly filling the screw holes.

• • Maybe fix the light sabre. Its control box is missing the buttons and triangular LEDs. And the barrel has a bunch of ridges instead of being smooth. Since I don't care much about the light sabre feature, however, I might not bother.

  • The silver panel on the right side of the body, which has five vertical blue recessed stripes, has a bunch of mistakes. It's too far over inwards, is the wrong shape, and the internal slots are all the wrong shape. The slot at the bottom running horizontally is most noticeable. This slot is shallow and blue on the DeAgo model, and the vertical slots are too narrow. The movie props were different - the horizontal slot was deeper and metal on the inside.

  • Fix or replace? Might not be worth it – that's a fair bit of work for minimal obvious visual differences.

  • Replace the coin return panels. The movie panels had narrower recessed areas, with a top section that was closer to horizontal. The edges of the slot were also fairly sharp, and the sides symmetrical and parallel to each other. Not hard, but may not be worth the pain.

  • Also, the rear coin return panels are too wide. The coin returns should align with the panels on the left and right sides. And they don't. What the heck were they thinking?

  • Move the microphone from the rear holoprojector to, say, the front data slot underneath the radar eye. Test if this location works. Having the microphone in the projector is stupid because a) the mike points backwards, and b) the holoprojector lens has an obvious hole in it.

  • Scribe recessed lines around the bottom of the dome, to make the two bottom rings look more like separate parts. Right now they're just represented by a blue-painted line. Scribing lines is a cheap and cheerful way of doing it that's less work than actually cutting separate rings.

  • The blue frame around the "radar eye" is positioned too high, resulting in a noticeable silver gap beneath it. Now, the ANH droids and ESB droids do differ in terms of eye placement, but the De Ago R2's eye is higher than both.

  • The radar eye surround has a data card slot that's too tall. Which is weird, because it exposes the metal dome surface underneath. Which looks pretty crappy. You'd think that the slot would go deep enough for Princess Leia to insert her Death Star plans data card, wouldn't you? They could easily have engineered the hole in the dome to accommodate such a slot, which would have been fun. Oh well.

• • The “radar eye” lens isn't recessed enough, isn't hemispherical enough, and is positioned incorrectly on the surround. It's got a shallow curvature and extends out too close to the surface of the blue block which surrounds it. This may be, in part, because the video camera looks through it. Too much of a curvature would act as another lens. Interestingly, De Ago changed the lens design – an early kit shipped with a fairly dark smoked plastic lens. This was replaced towards the end of the build, with another lens of the same size and shape but nowhere near as dark. The newer lens lets in more light, but also means that the camera and bracket and whatnot are visible through the lens, which is hardly screen-accurate. Anyway. I’ll probably replace the lens with a glass one with closer dimensions and ditch the camera feature.

  • The entire right-hand outer panel that makes up the back of the body is too short by about 1mm, as shown below. Seriously crappy quality control here. Fix using strip styrene or similar. I can't believe that this is necessary...

3. Difficult to fix without complex alterations

• • The two large front vents are pretty bad. Their proportions are wrong, they have curved edges and not sharp edges, and they're even different heights. The trick is to replace them while somehow keeping the front ultrasonic sensors working - or just drop the "patrol" feature altogether. Also, the black sensors with silver rings are really obvious in there. Right now I’m leaning towards replacing the parts with screen accurate 3D prints and abandoning the random wander feature.

• • Replace the two LCD panels used to simulate the logic lights with proper fibre optics driven by CPU-controlled LEDs. Basically I want a bank of appropriately coloured LEDs that will flash in a more movie-accurate and convincing fashion than the hyperactive LCD panels supplied by De Agostini. Make the logic lights work even when the droid is in manual mode. Unfortunately the spacing of these two lights is wrong - they weren't aligned vertically symmetrical in the movies. Fixing this would require replacing the curved metal plate, however.

• • And, speaking about the metal dome panels, they’re all too small for the cutouts in the dome. Which means there’s a unsightly gap visible between panel and dome. And there’s nothing you can do about this without replacing them all or replacing the dome. The real R2 domes were two domes, nested. There were holes in the outer dome, and panels attached to the inner dome. Since the panels were smaller than the holes, neat aluminium lines were visible in the gaps. The De Ago kit simulates this by running a narrow recess around each blue-painted bit of each pot metal panel. They then paint the pieces a fake silver colour to match the steel dome. The problem is that since the panels are slightly too small for the dome cutouts it means you get a slightly stepped interior dome line. More sloppy manufacturing by De Agostini.

  • Do something about the round plugs for the shoulder-mounted ultrasonic sensors? You either stick with those ugly things if you want to keep the so-called "autonomous" mode. Or you ditch the things, fill the holes, and disable that fairly useless mode. Incidentally the flat parts of the sensor are white-painted metal, with white silicone anti-vibration rings around them.

• • Put R2 into two-leg mode permanently. It would be cool, as you could store the mini R2 on a bookshelf or something. However, this would make it immobile; and so it's not something I'm going to do.

• • The battery boxes are the wrong size. Specifically they're too wide for either the ANH or ESB battery boxes. That's a tough one to fix without replacing the whole pair, plus you would have the problem of the motor boxes not fitting into screen-accurate boxes.

  • The middle foot is of course missing the slot at the top for the ankle to fit into. This is difficult to fix because the metal support post that extends down from the skirt area would be exposed if you cut a proper slot.

  • The trapezoidal panel lines on the sides of the middle foot are too narrow, and in completely the wrong place. They were probably moved out closer to the edges to accommodate the screw holes. Unfortunately since the corners are curved they're very challenging to rescribe correctly.

  • The middle foot, in addition to all the seams and gaps, attaches right to the flat bottom of the skirt. The real R2s had a recessed area, where there's space for the foot to retract into two-legged mode. The De Ago kit has no such recessed space. When seen from above, this isn't noticeable. When seen from floor level, or if R2 is on a bookshelf, it looks frankly pretty awful. It's hard to fix as you'd have to reconstruct the lower section of the internal frame and move stuff up to make space. As a compromise I'll probably make a middle foot-sized opening in the bottom of the skirt. It'll be too shallow, but better than a flat surface.

  • Fix the dreadful "broken toe" bump sensor in the middle foot. Not sure the best way to fix that while retaining the switch mechanism.

  • Do something about the Godawful split in the skirt plastics to accommodate the battery access hatch. (the crack is really wide and doesn't line up with anything on the skirt)

  • Fix and move the silver panel with five vertical slots (front body; right side) so that it's the correct size, shape, and location. Its slots, particularly the horizontal one which is too narrow, also need correcting. A lot of work for not that much return admittedly.

  • Fix the three feet/ankles so that they look like separate parts, not just single moulded pieces of plastic. (ie: cut slots, etc) I'll probably do this, despite the work. Doing so has its drawbacks, however, since cutting slots exposes the top of the wheel bracket and the motor gearbox. De Agostini did not design those parts to be visible in that way.

  • Replace the projector and its recordings with something better. Probably won't do this as it’s a toy feature and a load of work to fix.

  • Replace the camera with something higher quality (this would also require replacing the CPU in all likelihood, since the CPU puts heavy compression on the video image). Probably won't bother, especially since I'm going to replace the radar eye lens, which will mess up image quality anyway.

  • Make the round PSI animations look more convincing. Might be too much work to get them looking like ANH animations, especially since the De Ago ones are controlled by the CPU as diagnostic devices. At the very least I’ll move some of the LEDs around to more closely resemble the movie details.

  • The ANH body panels and ESB body panels differ in one subtle way - the position of some of the small grooved panels and front octagon port. This is a really minor difference and very difficult to notice unless you spend a stupid amount of time looking at photos of R2-D2, but it's there. Weirdly enough, De Ago have done a kind of bizarre hybrid - the octagon port is in the ESB position, and the small panels next to it are in an ANH position. The octagon port would have to be moved by a few mm towards the leg to make it more accurately ANH in appearance. A lot of work for little return.

  • The metal rods that run through the blue part of the legs come in two versions in the films. Some droids have rods that are the same diameter all the way down. Other droids have rods of two widths and which are narrower at the top. The De Ago version is narrower at the top, but not at the same point as any movie droid. Oh well.

  • The horizontal cylinders attached to the outer feet are wrong. The De Ago cylinders have an extra groove in them. It's obviously possible to replace these, but it'd also be sad to throw out the metal parts. When I removed the paint off my copy of the part, exposing the bare metal, it turns out the pieces were cast using different alloys and so discolour differently. Damn you, De Ago. Also the triangular wedge-shaped blue bit that holds them in has a sort of step at the end which isn’t on the original props. That requires filling and sanding down. Doable but tedious work.

  • The position of the wide horizontal recessed panel on the back is wrong. The ANH droids had a removable back panel, and so had a visible seam running along the top of the barrel back, where De Ago has positioned the top of the wide panel. However, De Ago has not modelled the removable back, but gone for an ESB look. The ESB droids had wide horizontal panels in the same position as the ANH droids did, which means the top of the wide panel does not line up with the narrow vertical panels on either side. No matter how you look at it, De Ago got it wrong again. Great job with the movie accuracy, guys. This is a huge pain to fix.

  • Another observation: the obvious thing for De Ago to have done with the back panels would have been to make the middle back panel section in line with the ANH original, so the seams would have been in the same place. Then they would have had ease of manufacturing, ease of product shipment, and movie accuracy all in one go. But did they do that? No, of course not! They have a seam which runs right up against the body panels, and which looks awful, especially where it angles in diagonally. Sigh.

  • Finally, the openable panels are designed crudely. The original doors were white doors laid over the gap between the panels. For some stupid reason the De Ago doors are thick plastic pieces, and the recesses are part of the doors. They did not have to do that.

4. Very difficult to fix without seriously heavy alterations

The following are all too much work for the return, so I probably won't do any of them.

• • Make the middle leg shorter, so less "ankle" is visible. (the three-legged R2-D2 props used in the OT movies had middle feet that basically end where the horizontal cylinders are. De Ago seems to have modelled their kit after R5-D4 (the red droid which blows up), which had a middle leg that extended further down, exposing more of its "ankle". ) This is a difficult error to fix, since you'd have to adjust the height of the outer two legs to compensate for the shorter centre leg. It's a shame, since I think the extended middle leg is kind of ugly.

  • The compromise I'll probably take is to shift the ankle, and its two ankle barrels, upwards since the position of the De Ago ankle rods is way too low. Also, the ankle needs to be fixed so it looks like the actual R2 ones (the De Ago ankle looks nothing like either the ANH or ESB droids).

  • Design a 2:3:2 modification that permits changing from 3 leg to 2 leg mode and back. This would involve altering the shoulders, making tiltable ankle joints, moving stuff around the body interior to accommodate the third leg, etc. A ton of work, and probably impossible to automate or motorize given the design of the model. I really wish De Ago had made the droid at least manually switchable between modes. Then you could have R2 in two-leg mode on a bookshelf, say. This is, needless to say, more work than I’m willing to commit.

• • Fix the disastrously incorrect feet. There's hardly an area they got right. The feet are slightly too wide and too long, and the inner curved notch is too high (the curve ends at the edge of the foot) The side of the ankle doesn't align with the side of the inner foot, because of the aforementioned extra-wide feet. The feet lack the big notch at the top, have unsightly seams through the middle, and the front detail of the outer feet is incorrect. The lack of the notches is particularly bizarre since it wouldn't have been hard to do them, and also because they would have concealed the moulding flaws better. 

  • Fix the feet to get rid of injection moulding draft. The angles of these parts are completely wonky because of manufacturing issues. Unfortunately fixing this problem properly would require replacing or heavily modifying the foot shells.

• • The skirt is wrong. Not only is it flat at the bottom, which wouldn't allow the third leg to move up, but the ridges are incorrect. The real R2s had ridges arranged in pairs. The earliest Ralph McQuarrie sketches and the wooden prototype R2 had ridges like this. Unfortunately the De Ago R2 has ridges which are spaced evenly across the bottom. Finally, the De Ago skirt has protruding cylinders for the screws. This is a pain to fix as you basically have to replace the whole skirt.

  • The port-side tall compartment door (on the right looking from the front) actually extends slightly down below its neighbouring panel on both the ANH and ESB droids. De Ago of course gets this wrong.

  • Upgrade the CPU so that it actually performs in a semi-autonomous "learning" fashion, and doesn't just wander randomly around the room. A Roomba vacuum cleaner has a lot more smarts than this R2. That would be a ton of work.

  • Upgrade the light sabre ejector. This is hardly the sabre-flinging slingshot from the movie - the "ejector" simply rises up a few centimetres on a motor. The pie panel also hinges out, unlike the movie one which improbably sort of retracts. However, I don't care about this feature particularly and can't be arsed to do anything about it. I might turn it into a lifeform detector antenna, but I doubt I'll bother.

  • Fix the blue manipulator/utility arms. They're supposed to be the same width as the top data slot, and they're all supposed to be aligned horizontally. Pretty simple to get right. But noooo De Ago screws this up completely - the arms are too narrow, aren’t tall enough, have the wrong overall shape, and aren't correctly aligned.

  • Speaking of the top data slot, the De Ago one is not only too wide, but has flat outer surfaces on the ends where it shouldn’t.

  • Replace the dome with one that has correctly sized plates and openings. The angled silver strips between the wedge-shaped pie segments are all too wide, some of the dome panels (eg: the narrow blue one to the left of the logic indicators) have noticeably incorrect spacing, the silver and blue rings at the bottom of the dome are too wide (tall), the magic panel proportions and size are totally off and it's incorrectly centre-aligned, and on and on and on. It’s even wonky at the bottom. The area which is supposed to represent the blue and silver neck rings should be parallel-sided (vertical-sided cylinder), but it’s actually slightly indented below the blue area, and flares out a bit at the very bottom. This is obviously too expensive a problem for anyone to want to bother fixing. But it's so aggravating that they screwed this up, as there doesn't seem to be any real reason for the incorrect hole sizes/locations. (ie: their dome manufacturing process clearly permits narrow gaps, as some of the blue panels are more tightly arranged)

• • Add two actual metal rings to the bottom of the dome, replacing the crude painted stripe. Note the photos above - the De Ago blue stripe is way too narrow.

  • Do something about the dome's weight. If you watch the De Ago R2 rolling along, it has a jerky nodding motion. This is because its design is too top heavy! The weight should be primarily down at the bottom so you avoid the sort of pendulum effect. The dome weight is partly because it's made of steel, but it's also mainly because the dome is filled with a completely unnecessary support frame. The frame is bolted together from tons of bits of pot metal and stamped steel, and weighs a ludicrous 495 grams! The steel dome alone is just 186. A handful of plastic bits would have been more than adequate to support the internal pieces, and would have reduced the top heaviness by nearly half a kilogram. This is bozo design.

  • The front PSI is larger than it should be, and vertically aligned. The actual movie front PSI was proportionally smaller and slightly closer to the bottom than the top.

  • If that's not bad enough, the rear PSI frame is the wrong height. For some reason, and I can't think of any charitable reason at all, the designers decided to make the frame around the back PSI the same height as the bare metal panel next to it. They added extra height, so the PSI isn't vertically centered anymore. Naturally they also screwed up the proportions of the bare metal section of the panel.

  • They made the rear dome bumps too big, and put them in the wrong place - they're too high, and centre-aligned to the panel below. Which of course doesn’t match any screen-used droid.

• • Replace the Leia voiceover with a version that doesn't have the intrusive music clip. Why they didn't ask Lucasfilm for audio of the voice track without the music I don't know.

  • Make R2 stop beeping the same stupid confirmation beep each time you send a command. Over and over and over. What's wrong with you, De Ago designers? Again, requires a complete replacement of the CPU since I doubt it'd be quick and easy to hack.

  • Replace the De Agostini-supplied electronics with programmable and more configurable electronics. Improved remote-control electronics, such as the setup used by TRamp (see link below) offers fine control and proportional commands for a much more realistic R2 movement. However, true RC command means giving up the random wander "autonomous" mode.

  • Four of the weakest points on the model, at least in terms of visual accuracy, are directly related to the so-called "autonomous" mode, where the robot can roll around randomly. And those are the two ultrasonic sensors on the shoulders, the ultrasonic sensor inside the front vents, and the awful broken toe middle foot sensor. By making the droid remote-only these sensors could be removed and the gaps neatly covered up.

Mod or not to mod?

Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in making modifications to this kit. Compare this situation to the absolutely huge market of third-party add-ons created for the De Agostini Millennium Falcon, for example. Or Eaglemoss' Back to the Future DeLorean or Ghostbusters ECTO-1. For some reason there's hardly anything that I've found for R2. Maybe because nobody bought the kit? Maybe because people are satisfied enough with the level of accuracy? Maybe because the mods for this kit aren't always cheap? I have no idea.

I'll happily post links to anyone who's done mods to their De Ago R2. So far I've only found a couple other than myself. Most of the ones on the De Agostini discussion boards appear to be people who have done various types of custom paint jobs, and don't appear to have altered the physical hardware itself.

Other people's modifications

• Age of Plastic, my small but growing collection of 3D-printed mods for this product.

• TRamp, maker of an R2-KT droid using the De Ago kit. Also maker of a superbly crafted and completely upgraded R2 unit with entirely new replacement electronics; abandoning the De Ago CPU altogether. This R2 unit is controlled by a proper RC controller, rather than using the De Ago phone app. Check it out!

• Motorized arms - a very nifty electromechanical upgrade mod by "Teslabe".

• chefhawk's modifications - removing dome gap; light blocking at the feet. Also fixing the compartment doors.

• De Agostini online forums – various build diaries. Mostly just people documenting their build projects, with a few of them doing custom weathering.

• DeAgostini / ModelSpace Build R2-D2, Build Diaries, the biggest Facebook group of De Ago R2 builders.

• Build Your Own R2-D2 by deagostini, another Facebook group of builders.

• My R2-D2 Build by "MarvelPhx".

III   –  About Partworks Kits

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