New center foot design

R2-B4 is foot loose and fancy free.  Hahahaha, I make myself laugh sometimes :)

I thought I would likely have to rebuild my center foot from scratch.  I would have done if I was using plastic again, as the whole assembly would need to be glued in to place in again.  And with hand tools, replacing a part that's the exact dimensions to fit in the same sized space is just a nightmare.

So instead, I used my new favorite thing in the world.  Dinosaurs! Aluminium!

I had a few ideas bouncing around in the ol' noggin similar to this, but using some square tube rather than solid.  But the problem is that if you put a nut and bolt through a piece of square tube, you're pinching the material into air and compromising strength.  In a styrene droid I could probably get away with it and just tighten the bolts regularly, but from now on everything has to be done in the "best practice".  I need to pretend I know what I'm talking about.

So, here's the design!

As the base of the foot was designed for 1 caster, I had to take out a lot of material to allow this to fit.

The casters are the same as the single one I used before, but this time I wanted to use 2 wheels.  To do this, I needed smaller wheels and to create a smaller blueprint.  If they're too close together the wheels would touch and cause him to stick, and if they were too far apart they would catch the side of the foot.  So, I used 72mm Skateboard wheels (with flashing blue lights - nice!) and re-drilled the wheel mounting holes.


This gives me a bit more room to play with and still allows the castor to do its swively thing.


So, how do you think he fared?  Silly question!

It was obvious right from the get go that this was an improvement.  So I decided to run somethings over.  I only slowed him down so he didn't run me over too!

So now that the center foot isn't locked, he can tackle trickier terrain quite happily.  One issue that I have now is that where the foot bolts into the ankle, with out the lock in place it's slightly wobbly.  I should be able to sort this out with some washers in the ankle U channel.  Will let you know how I get on :)