Ankle Sanding/Painting

After the wood putty was dry, I sanded the ankle pieces smooth and painted them. I looks like they will need some more wood putty and need to be painted again later, but I can do that after I glue them to the legs.

Ankle Smoothing

After the flat part of the ankles were glued, I filled the gaps with wood putty to smooth them out.

Continuing The Ankle Fix

With the new angles cut on the ankle pieces, 6-year-old Joshua helped me trace the new end caps on some flat 1/4" plywood. He loves it anytime he can help! I cut them out and re-glued them.

Battery Box Hiccup

Clay and I continuted the work on the battery boxes by cutting the inside channel on three of the sets. We also continued work on the beefy ankle pieces. We realized we cut the angle at 35° rather than 55° so we had to cut a little more off. I will recut and reglue the flat portions this weekend so we are ready to cut out the channel pieces with the CNC next Monday.

Starting Work On The Ankle Pieces

We had an off-schedule build night tonight. Clay and I worked on fixing the battery box sides now that the CNC has been re-leveled.

I bought an 8' long 6" diameter Tape-Ease Half Cylinder (the smallest amount I could purchase) and a 2'x2' sheet of 1/4" plywood from Lowe's to make outer and inner ankle pieces. We used club plans and Victor Franco's tutorial for this project. It took us awhile to figure out how to cut the half tubes with the equipment we had. We also ran into a little snag because part of the half cylinder was a little more flat than the other.

We ended up using a chop saw for all of the cutting. We cut three 4 1/8" length outer ankle pieces and three 4" length inner ankle pieces. The half cylinders have a height of 3". The outer ankle requires a cylinder height of 1 3/8" and the inner ankle requires a height of 1 1/4". We cut these pieces slightly bigger and used the sander to smooth out the edges and get them to the right height.

Once at the correct height, we angled the chop saw and cut a 55 degree angle off each ankle piece. We laid the slanted portion of the ankle piece on the flat 1/4" plywood, drew an over sized half circle, and then cut it out. The half circle was glued to the slanted portion of the ankle with plenty of overhang on each side. The over sized half circle will allow sanding later and still keep the needed angles while allowing the pieces to lay flat on the legs.