Leg Work

Dash, KITT, Moose, and I got together tonight to continue the work on our R2 legs. I started out by rough cutting another set of ½" leg pieces for me so I can experiment with a 2-3-2 leg conversion. Moose and I then rough cut all of the ¾" leg pieces.

While the rest of the leg pieces were being cut out, Dash, KITT, and Moose worked on the routers and tables. Apparently we overworked the router on our last leg building work day. Dash wasn't sure we could salvage his old router, so he bought a used one off of Craig's List. After Dash took his old router appart to retrieve the bit KITT installed it in the new router and mounted it to the old router table. Dash and Moose manged to save the old router, but Moose modified his router table to work with KITT's router so more than one person could route at a time.

After the router was fixed, everybody got into the routing. We managed to get four complete and two partial ½" sets of leg pieces routed. Don't let the pictures fool you, routing in the dark is hard. KITT's forehead flashlight may look dorky but it helped out a lot.

All that routing creates a lot of sawdust!

Leg Men

We decided it was about time to start making the outer legs for our droids so Victor Franco's tutorial based on Michael Senna's design seemed to be the perfect fit. I stopped by Menards today over lunch and picked up a 4'x8'x½" piece of MDO plywood and a 4'x8'x¾" piece of regular plywood (this is a little overkill, but hopefully we can use the extra ¾" plywood for the center legs later). I still need to pickup a 4'x4'x¼" sheet of plywood, but I think we have more than enough wood and work to get us by for now. A quick count of working local club members determined that we were going to need outer legs for me, another builder, Mr. Claybo, KITT, and Dash. Yes, your math is correct. That is five sets or ten legs. Out total cost so far is a little over $75 for the outer legs. Without counting the ¼" plywood and the hardware, the cost per leg is about $7.50.

Moose and I started out the evening by tracing the legs onto the ½" plywood.

While Moose and Mr. Claybo traced the outer leg patterns on the ¾" plywood, KITT and I cut out the ½" plywood outer legs and ankles.

After a night of hard work, the group decided to play a little outer leg guitar.

WOW!!! Those are a lot of leg pieces! And we haven't even cut out the ¾" and ¼" leg and ankle plywood pieces yet.