I: About the De Agostini R2-D2 Kit

Hey there! Just to let you know that this particular site is no longer being updated. All content has been moved over to my new site: 3Dsf.info. Update your bookmarks today!

However, there two notable visual errors. The shoulders are supposed to look like this. First, most of the screen-used droids had layered sheets of metal inside the circular area. Second, the uppermost of the two round shoulder buttons were actually installed at a strange angle. And third, the tops are all perpendicular to the sides, rather than being angled slightly, like the De Ago kit.

On the whole the R2 is much more screen-accurate than the De Ago Falcon. Their Falcon kit was riddled with tons of really minor errors and deviations that, to be honest, only really obsessed fans would notice. The R2, being far simpler and more geometric in design, is mostly correct.

However, the R2 errors are also super aggravating. Most of them simply aren't necessary. Some visual mistakes are obviously done the way they are to save money, or to make the parts easier to manufacture. But others aren't needed at all, and are simple sloppiness.

Visual errors in design.

If there's one word to sum up the problems with the De Agostini R2, it's “toylike.”

• The dome as a whole is okay, but does have some notable detail problems. It's a turned metal part of a decent thickness, with punched holes for all the various panels and greeblies. It’s brushed steel (rather than aluminium like the original 1977 R2), but matches the correct R2 dome profile. (ie: it’s not half a sphere but more of an ovoid) Unlike the other shipments, which come in plastic bags, the dome is larger and ships in a protective plastic shell, inside a box. The real R2 props had a separate silver ring at the base. The De Ago dome is one piece with a painted blue line, and many customers, including me I'm sad to say, have reported that the painted blue line is overlapping and misaligned where the ends join.

• The most obvious dome error is the small silver ring at the very top. It's too large in diameter. As spraypainted plastic, it doesn't match the colour and texture of the metal dome surface. This is difficult to fix since you'd need to enlarge and replace the blue disc also.

  • Most problematically, 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, and the silver and blue rings at the bottom of the dome are too wide (tall). These are horrible errors if you notice them, because they're basically impossible to fix without making a whole new dome from scratch. Which nobody is going to do.

• The gap between the bottom of the dome ring and the top of the body cylinder varied from film to film and scene to scene. However, the De Ago model has a bigger gap than generally appears in the films. This looks pretty bad, and is tricky to eliminate since you have file or cut down some metal pieces without removing too much material or making the head rotation unbalanced.

  • The “radar eye” lens isn't recessed enough and isn't hemispherical enough. It's got a shallow curvature and extends out too close to the surface of the blue block which surrounds it. This may, in part, be 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 not screen-accurate.

• The main errors in body proportion involve the feet, especially the central foot, which has an ankle that's too long. 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," if you will. This is a difficult error to fix, since you'd have to adjust the tilt angle of the body to compensate for the shorter centre leg, and De Ago has designed fixed shoulder joints.

• In terms of foot details, they all 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 bizarre since it wouldn't have been hard to do them, and also because they would have concealed the moulding flaws better. Sloppy.

• The central 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 or parallel, this isn't noticeable. When seen from floor level it looks frankly pretty awful. It's hard to fix this as you'd have to reconstruct the lower section of the internal frame and move stuff up to make space.

• The battery hoses look terrific - actual braided copper - but they're simply too narrow in diameter. They're 4.5mm in diameter, but should probably be more like 6-7mm in diameter. That may not sound like much, but does make a noticeable difference in appearance. They also should terminate in diamond-knurled metal nuts, but only plain white plastic cylinders are visible on the De Ago model.

• The shoulders have recessed discs which don't exist on the original. They look like plastic screw hole covers, and frankly don't look great. They actually conceal ultrasonic wall sensors.

That round thing at the bottom is a wall sensor housed in soft white silicone rubber. Sure wish De Agostini had put it somewhere else.

• On the De Ago model the two shoulder buttons on each side protrude evenly (see below). Oddly enough, the upper one was angled up slightly on the actual movie props – they weren't parallel.

• The two square recesses and long rectangular recess on each shoulder should have square and sharp-edged corners. On the De Ago model they're not - they have rounded corners. This is really difficult to fix well without making a mess.

• The shoulder inner surfaces on most of the real R2 props (the ILM über R2 built for the prequels is one exception) were made of layered sheets of aluminium, as in the photo above. Sadly the De Ago kit doesn’t bother with this, probably to save money – the horseshoe inner surfaces are smooth white plastic.

On the left: the shoulder buttons I mention above. The upper one is the spraypainted one, straight from the factory. The lower one has had its paint stripped and the metal is roughly polished. Note how the round central area has simple white plastic walls rather than showing metal layers. Also the recessed areas should be silver, but the rounded wall edges make them awkward to paint.

• • The dome has small LCD panels to simulate the the blue and white dot "logic" lights (fibre optics on the originals). These flash in a hyperactive and continuous fashion. The animation is a bit closer to the displays in Empire than the slower ones in Star Wars, but doesn't have the ESB-style moving white patterns. Sadly there's no speed switch or any way of changing the programming, which is permanently burned into the chips on each board. Also, the actual logic light frames were deeply recessed, and the De Agostini ones aren't, and the LCD panels look much sharper and cleaner than the rather rough movie prop fibre optics.

• The front and rear "logic" lights do not illuminate when the droid is in manual mode (ie: when you press front buttons to make it work). Mysteriously these lights can only illuminate if the droid is being controlled over WiFi. Why, De Agostini?

• The front logic lights are too close together. There should have been more of a vertical gap. The De Ago lights are also vertically symmetrical instead of being closer to the top than the bottom of the frame. Are most people going to notice this obscure error? No. But it's one of those pointless errors that wouldn't have cost a thing to have got right.

• The long narrow rear logic lights are flat on the interior. The actual props had a curved (part cylindrical) surface where the fibre optics were installed, not a flat plate. The rear logic lights also have a ton of light bleed from the sides of the LCD panel, which looks awful. It's not difficult to stick some light-blocking tape on the inside of the housing, though.

• The white plastic "skin" for the main body cylinder is made up of a bunch of smaller pieces that can be easily mailed. Accordingly there are a load of seams and gaps all over the body in places the original didn't have. Fortunately most of these are easy to putty over and fix if you're repainting the kit. Which you'll probably want to do, since the panels are not painted with a uniform shade of white.

• Unfortunately there is a serious error in the large central back plastic piece. It's too tall by around 2mm, and so doesn't line up correctly with the side panels. This is an awkward one to fix neatly.

• There are also visible seams all over the feet, which frankly look pretty crummy. They're difficult to eradicate, because you can't just putty them over. Unless, of course, you don't mind sealing up the motors and electronics. But that's a bad idea since you wouldn't be able to re-open the legs and feet to repair any failed parts. If only De Agostini had engineered the screws to be inside the assembly, accessible from the underside...

• The toe of the middle foot looks seriously bad. The very tip is a separate section, and forms part of a bump sensor that physically moves when pressed. The result is a foot with a strange angled gap that looks like a crack. Awful.

  • The middle foot also contains a regular rotating caster (US) or castor (UK) like you'd see on furniture or whatever. And, despite the over-engineering on other parts of the model, the caster simply bolts to the inside of the plastic foot. It doesn't attach to any internal metal framework! I suppose it should be okay, but that fact is rather odd. The caster doesn't work very well over carpet.

• The octagon ports (described as "heat exhaust grilles" by De Agostini) are inaccurate. These features vary slightly from ANH to ESB, with the central disc size and rear slat positions being the main differences. As for the slats, some people paint them black and others leave them open. Some R2 versions even have simple black-painted lines representing the slats. However, the De Ago octagon port has shallow depressions for slats, with oddly rounded ends to them. The port as a whole is shallower than the movie originals, which were actually fairly deep (the ports were about an inch on the actual movie props, so should be 11mm deep on the De Ago model, instead of 5mm). Finally, to save money the silver parts are moulded as a single component with the central disc thing having parallel sides at the bottom (ie: it’s not attached by a narrower central disc like it should be). These ports are down at the bottom and hard to see, but if you want more accurate octagons I've made 3D modelled replacements.

Left: the De Ago part's profile. Right: the correct profile.

• 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. 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).

• Left: one of the toylike De Ago holoprojectors. Right: my 3D-printed replacement test print, which is fairly close to the screen-used parts.

• The Leia hologram has sound taken straight from the movie soundtrack (help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!), so it also includes a snippet of music that then cuts out. Which sounds pretty amateur! Why they didn't ask Lucasfilm for audio of the voice track without the music (it exists online – there's nothing secret about it) I don't know.

• Note that the Leia hologram will not appear if the projector is hooked up to the test battery pack. It must be connected to the finished controller to work. Alternatively you can short out a connector to see the Leia sequence.

• The shoulder stabilizers - the kind of thumbscrew and rod things which fit under the shoulders - are mounted flush to the surface of the, well, armpits. They're fairly crisply moulded from plastic, but only model the outer half of the cylinders. The real ones fit into a slightly deeper slot, and most if not all of the knurled cylinders are visible.

• 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.

• There are a couple of white panels on the front of the body which can be manually opened to reveal silver-painted moulded plastic panels with built-in greeblies. These look really toylike. What makes things worse is that the doors have slight notches on one edge, so you can pull them open with a finger. Those notches, needless to say, are not present on the movie R2-D2 props, and again, contribute to the look of a toy.

• No, these silver-painted boxes aren't from a $100 toy droid, but an expensive partworks kit!

• The doors do not close properly, and stick out slightly when shut. This takes a lot of cutting and fiddling to get right.

• The optional manual fold-out arms which live inside the compartments only vaguely resemble the movie prop arms. It's like someone saw the movie, did a rough sketch the next week from memory, then designed the arms around those.

• The two front vent covers are used to conceal the front ultrasonic sensors. Unfortunately the black sensors with silver rings are really obvious in there. Making things worse is that the angles of the louvres are wrong so that the sensors will work, and the proportions of the vents are a bit  off. Some people have painted their sensors black, which helps a lot.

• 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.

• The ankle wedge - the blue bit that fits between the two cylindrical components at the ankle of each foot – is the wrong shape. It's modelled as a kind of blocky rectangular piece, but it should be a simple triangular wedge.

• In terms of colour it mostly seems okay, from what I’ve seen. However many subscribers have been getting white-painted body panel segments that don’t match, colour-wise. In other words different batches of paint were used at the factory for different production runs of the parts. This won’t matter if you plan on repainting or weathering, but looks really bad if you just want to assemble it and be done.

• To be fair, R2 paint colours in general are tricky since the actual movie props vary a lot. Some early Star Wars (1977) promo shoots, for example, feature an R2 with a bunch of unpainted parts! Stuff that should be blue in those shots is white or metallic. There’s a famous “magic panel” on the back of the head which looked like a plain metal panel most of the time, but which mysteriously lit up red in some scenes. The ring around the front projector in Star Wars is blue in some shots and black in others – and silver in Empire. There's a grey panel on the back of the body that's present in at least one ANH prop and not in others. And so on.

Not always designed for later painting.

Most of the parts are already pre-painted. And aside from the inconsistent white shades, the paint job is fairly reasonable. Though it is intended to represent a factory-new droid and not a weathered old unit that has been trundling determinedly across the Jundland wastes after an Imperial assault. It’s an industrial spray finish, fairly even, and colour-consistent across most, but sadly not all, parts.

However, it’s not an amazing job either. The blue parts, in particular, are more dull and less deep than those on the movie R2 units. They're dark and slightly purplish in tone – though that isn't a problem in itself as the original R2s had a purple-blue tone which depended on the light. There are also noticeable differences in appearance between the metal plates painted blue and the plastic pieces painted blue.

The problem is that if you want to repaint your droid it’s often awkward to do it as you go along, as you may want to paint all objects at one go for consistency. You also can’t assemble all the sub-components until the exterior surfaces are all painted.

That’s understandable, but what I find particularly annoying is that many components have two colours but, rather than making that component out of two pieces, it’s a single piece with a painted-on section. Like a bit that’s spray-painted silver with a blue bit sticking out. It would have been much easier if, like the actual R2 props, these components had been constructed out of multiple parts. And had they done so it’d have given more busywork for the builder to do! Such a shame.

The silver body panels with the blue vertical stripes (pocket vents) are a perfect example of what De Agostini should have done throughout. They’re made of two pieces of plastic - one painted silver and one painted blue behind it. This design makes it super easy to repaint properly!

Observations on the parts.

Because the kit is designed to be built across 100 issues, and because some electronic components are quite expensive to manufacture, many issues don’t really include much at all, just so that per-issue costs average out. Or they just include one or two parts that fit together in seconds. Unlike, say, a model ship which consists of a ton of small detail parts with a couple of larger hull pieces, the R2 kit includes some very expensive components such as motors, the steel dome, a CPU, and a video projector.

There are times when an issue arrives and it's got all kinds of interesting stuff and it's quite fun to assemble. And then there are times when something like this shows up. And, after you've spent your 7 seconds putting that solitary component in place without any tools you think to yourself, why the hell didn't De Agostini make this a 50 issue subscription?

Also, many parts of the model which would normally be produced as one or two large parts for a conventional product - the dome subframe, for example - are included in the subscription as tons of smallish pieces you need to bolt together. This is all fairly pointless make-work kind of stuff that also adds a lot of weight to the model. The finished R2 is actually quite heavy, in large part because of the additional complexity of its internal frame.

Here's the needlessly fiddly dome framework, with a bazillion small plates, connectors, nuts, and bolts.

A more logical design would have halved the number of issues, but that might be harder for De Ago to market profitably as then the per-issue cost would be higher. Also, and this is obviously a common problem with many kits, but much of the assembly is a bit repetitive. All the dome frame segments, and the two mirror-image legs, for example. That’s just the reality of the design, though.

Since each R2 weekly kit tends to be rather simple and limited, De Ago UK mail out these subscriptions as four packs once a month instead of single issues each week. They’re still individually packaged as weekly issues, though, so you end up throwing away rather a lot of bags and cardboard labels.

Middling-quality plastic moulding.

The injection molded parts are okay, but are not created using the most advanced processes. Let's just say it's not Bandai quality here. Take, for example, the feet, which are about the worst examples of plastic moulding in the kit. The De Agostini droid feet are made of two halves split vertically, but since the tops of each part aren’t perpendicular to the sides - they angle upwards slightly to a narrow seam - they look frankly rather toylike. (a noticeable draft to the injection moulding, in other words)

Those seams are not befitting a £900 product! Or that silver-painted part - it's just a bit sticking out, and has a bunch of asymmetrical gaps when the middle bit fits in.

The feet screw together from the sides, and come with plastic plugs to conceal the holes, rather than having the screws fit into concealed locations. For example, the feet could have been engineered such that the screws reach up from the underside, hiding them. Instead, this conventional and lazy product design makes the feet look like ordinary Earthbound commercial products rather than a droid from a galaxy far, far away.

This mini light sabre, includes with R2, is a classic De Agostini mixed bag. The shiny metal bits are awesome – they're beautiful pieces of turned metal. Hefty, quality parts. Fab! But the gold bit and the black and matte silver part? They're plastic! (Note: this sabre is incomplete - I haven’t fitted the control box yet)

Look at that plastic mould seam all the way across, and the torn patch where the part was ripped off a sprue. Argh!

Metal parts versus plastic.

Some detail components that are metal on the original design are also metal in the kit, especially those which ship earlier in the build, in order to impress buyers. But other parts are moulded plastic. All parts are sprayed a uniform silver colour to conceal the differences in material. There are a number of consequences to this.

The bottom metal piece is straight out of the bag. It looks nice and new, but it's also indistinguishable from spraypainted plastic. The upper piece, which has been sanded and polished and left to tarnish, deliberately looks a bit scruffy, beaten-up, and ragged, as one expects R2 to look like.

First, some of the solid metal parts look really great. Especially if you strip off the paint and polish the metal. The result is a very convincing and realistic component. I used medium to fine grades of sandpaper and emery cloth to remove the silver paint, sand off the seam lines, and simulate a brushed metal look. I then used a superfine foam sanding block to give the final brushed appearance, always moving the part in the same direction across the block. Some of these pieces, such as the shoulder pistons, also look extra good when trimmed back on the underside to reflect their actual prototype appearance. Parts like this really feel worth the money! Unfortunately most of the larger pieces are plastic rather than diecast metal.

The lower pieces are the spray-painted parts out of the bag. The upper ones have been sanded to remove the horrible seam lines, and buffed to resemble brushed metal.

Second, although the genuine metal parts look great when sanded and polished, they’re not all cast from the same alloys. As a result, they all turn a dull grey colour as they oxidize, but in different shades and darknesses. That may be okay if you’re going for a weathered old R2 look, but if you want an R2 fresh from the shop this is a problem. I don't know if this oxidizing would be halted or at least slowed by coating the parts with clear coatings.