Beefy Ankles
I had the rough form of the R6-T3x body on my bench, with a Skirt attached and a place-holder dome sitting on top… time to re-visit the legs. So, going back to where I left off, I had the legs assembled and drilled for attachment to the body. I next wanted to get the Ankles Beefy. I began by modeling the Beefies in Fusion. I had decided that they would be attached to the Legs with Glue and Screws so I added counter-sunk screw holes to the model. These were then printed in ABS with a .20mm Layer Height and medium infill.
Ankle Brackets
Once I got my Beefy Ankles mounted and sanded to a nice smooth finish, I then primed the legs again and moved on to the Ankle Brackets.
I’m cutting my Ankle Bracket out of 0.125” Aluminum. It really would have been a natural for me to draw these up in CAD and send them to my CNC, but honestly, my bandsaw makes such quick work of this stuff, and I was already in the Lab and didn’t feel like heading to my office. (I made extensive use of my CNC aluminum cutting abilities later on)
Center Ankle
With all my talk earlier about the Legs, I neglected to mention the Center Ankle, which I built at the same time and, basically, the same way. Really nothing ground breaking here, just another Birch Ankle. The ankle is attached to a piece of ½” Birch ply with screws and lags (shown in these pictures with temporary Spruce). This Birch plate is then bolted thru the bottom of my Body Cylinder and attaches to my simple Frame, which in turn ties all three legs together keeping them rigid. This frame, which I’ll discuss here later was a concession that I made while I was experimenting with my Frameless Body Design. I was closing in on this frameless body, but got impatient and wanted to get going on this droid before I had perfected my leg attachments. In the end I wound up using a simple frame after all.
CNC Tool Path files for wood legs
I have recently had a couple Club Members ask me for the files I used to create the tool paths for my CNC Cut wooden leg pieces. These pieces are NOT the ones used in my T3x Build… I cut those legs out before I have finished building my CNC Machine.