Just read through this thread. Great job on your R2 so far. I'm curious what is to become of your 3D printed dome. Are you going to try and finish the smoothing process to see how close you can get it to your aluminum one? Maybe print more parts and finish it eventually?
By the way, this got me curious about printing large parts. Are there consumer printers available today that can do an object as large as the dome in one piece? And if not, is the only hinderance the physical limitation of the print bed/head-travel size? Like could someone take a printer made for smaller objects, and just ....bigify the travel mechanisms. Sorry to use a technical term like that. Or would the software need to be rewritten to handle that, etc.?
Anyways, very cool project. Wasn't the blue color on the originals determined to be metal marking dye or something like that?