L3-G0, the full size Lego R2-D2.

We've made a few Lego models, such as the Lego Disney Wonder cruise ship and a Lego Space Needle, and it's about time to do something new, but all of our ideas were pretty lame.  So in the back of our minds there was some thinking about "what could we build next?" 

Then we went to Emerald City Comicon and saw some of the wonderful Astromechs there.  Of course I wanted to build one, but quickly realized it'd be a ton of effort, cost a lot, and I wasn't terribly familiar with the materials.

It should've been obvious, but "gee, I wanna build a droid" sat in one part of my brain while "I wonder what I'll build next in Lego" sat in another part.  Eventually we came to the obvious conclusion:  "I'll build an L3-G0".  Don't know why it took so long.

Normally I grab a bunch of bricks and start building, then get more bricks, but for various reasons I started toying around with some of the sections in Lego Digital Designer to see if some of my ideas were practical.  Of course, once I started, I forgot to stop.

Now we have a 15,000 piece model pretty much figured out, and all we need are about 12K more bricks!  (Well, and some sort of frame, and some motors, and some electronics).  We're hoping that at least part of L3-G0 will be done for BrickCon in October.  Feel free to send us your spare bricks ;-)

There are some parts that will undoubtedly need changed from the LDD model, and he's going to need an internal frame of aluminum or wood or something, but it should be do-able.

A couple more screenshots of the drawing:

The model is based on plans from the R2-D2 Builder's Club (Astromech.net)  Of course brick isn't as finely detailed as manufactured parts, but he should be "pretty close" to spec.  He'll probably be about 100 pounds.  Eventually we'd like more functionality, but for a start we're looking at getting him to move and beep in time for Emerald City Comicon (ECCC) 2014.  We'd love to take him other places too, anyone know how to get him to Celebration in one piece?

We'll post more as the project goes.

Bricks acquired so far:  15900/16000.