OK, so I had great success with changing my Star Wars Premium Formats over to AC power this morning, especially the droids. I did also get Chewbaccas base but I ran out of transformers so I couldn't finish the Emperors Throne (this will be another easy one however when I grab another transformer).
I will put up a few pics and a brief description of what I did but the basic wrap up is that I now have AC powered statues without doing any mods or damage to any of the pieces. It took me about an hour with only a few household tools and some dowel and transformers.
Lets start with R2:
I am going to assume that every R2 has a seam/join under the removable dome. With a gentle press you can split this enough to feed a draw line through and out the bottom hole for his middle leg.
It would be smarter to use a smaller bit of string or something - but I am both lazy and dopey - so I just used an overly thick strip of wire (but it did the trick and when I tied off the wires from the transformer and pulled it through, the plastic join closed up again on the smaller wires (and if I ever decide to remove this mod - I am sure it would return to its original level self).
Now for replacing the batteries (By the way - there are probably a lot of better tutorials for this out there), just grab a battery sized (diameter) length of dowel from your local hardware and then cut it to the length (just shorter) of your required batteries (I just used a stanley knife - then gave it a quick sand to tidy up). Then with a small drill bit, drill a hole through the center of the dowel and feed a wire from the transformer through. After this you can strip the shielding off then wrap the exposed wire around a small screw and screw it in the top of the dowel (make sure your wire and screw keep contact). After this I wrapped some electrical tape around because the dowel feels very fragile when you start putting screws in there and it also made it easy to mark my Pos and Neg.
If you have more than 2 battery compartments you can do what I did and make another fake battery that simply has a wire through the middle that connects a screw at each end. This will complete the circuit on jobs that require more than just the 2 batteries. Again, there are probably better ways to do this, I am just giving you what worked easily for me.
Now is probably a good time to say don't blame me if things go wrong for you and of course unless you know what kind of transformer you should be using or if you are not confident at all - please don't try this at home... That being said I am reminded of this...
We are only talking about 4.5V and 1000ma - but I guess it is connected to AC and as such you should enter it with the knowledge and care that live power demands.
Now lets try and share a movie...
Now after I had success with Chewies base and R2, I decided to have a crack at C3PO. He actually turned out to be no drama at all as when you remove the face piece, you should see a very small gap located between the back of the helmet and the neck brace. This gap is just big enough to fit the two required (stripped) wires through and also is snug enough to keep them from falling out and being easily visable - THIS WAS A GIANT WIN in my books. So from here it is basically 2nd verse, same as the first. All I needed to do was cut a much smaller piece of dowel and cut back my smallest screw so it didn't poke through the other side to where my neg wire is (I also wrapped a bit of electrical tape on the base to be sure and to tidy up the neg wire too).
And there you go, I have a simple remote setup to my power board for now, though I might look at getting a more advanced setup there, maybe separate the LEDs and the statue lights to have either or both... I might even get a motion activated switch for when anyone walks in the room... hmmm food for thought. There is also a custom base coming to raise all the Detolfs about 400mm off the floor and to hide and tidy all of the wiring, I will post some final pics if there is any interest.
So here is the vid for a working C3PO (again I hope it works).
