More re-assembling tonight after painting last week. I did a mix of things from the feet to working on some skin panels.

I got the feet and ankles back together, and using the hex bolts worked out great. It was a breeze installing the ankle details.

With everything R2, there’s always a few steps back with a dozen forward. Today it was the braided hoses. I’d planned on using these expanding rubber plugs to hold the cables in place, but they didn’t quite work as I’d hoped. For some reason rather than bunching up and expanding the nut inside just moved/ripped up the rubber with minimum expansion as shown. The ‘bulge’ at the top being the maximum width.

Back to the drawing board and Ace Hardware tomorrow to look for an alternative. I was tempted to try Douglas Olson’s KHF System again, but space is very tight and they’ll not work for me with the JAG feet and drive system.

The other problem I had was once I tried to install the battery boxes they wouldn’t fit over the NPC motors. All the test fittings I did while filing down the tops of the motors was done without the ankle on the foot, so now I have less room to bend the box over and down onto the motors. An easy fix, but I was hoping to get the feet, ankles and legs back together tonight and now I can’t.

I also worked a little bit more on the frame and got the front vents installed and attached to the frame at last. Not sure how I’m going to fix in the blue surround at this point. Maybe silicon, but I want to be able to remove it easily with the skins. The fit is tight and I can see when removing the skins that it may get pulled off with little effort.

I was going to add a few more coats of paint to the skins today, but on close inspection in the daylight they looked fine. A lot of the dust spots I was seeing yesterday just rubbed off with my finger now that the paint has had time to dry. I’m going to leave it a few more days before I attempt to remove the masking tape, as it’s been pretty cold and I’m not sure how the paint cures in this sort of weather.

I’ve decided to re-assembling R2. Started off with something easy – the center ankle as it’s relatively simple and self contained. I need to get him back on 3 legs to start laying out the electronics again. I’m probably going to move things around a bit, for example I know the speed controller can’t stay where I had it on the back mounting plate as it now hits the skins. It may end up on the back side of the plate or somewhere else internally. I also want to build in some sort of switch and circuit to allow me to charge the batteries in place rather than having to remove the cables each time to clip the charger on.

I’ve been paranoid all week that I’m going to ding or mark the paint, and tonight I had to moved passed that. Right off the bat there was no avoiding dirty fingerprint from the grease when handling the new white paint, plus I scratched a some paint off trying to get the ankle to fit back in the foot shell slot. I really should have filed down the metal parts a long time ago to compensate for the added paint – but I didn’t. I’m sure it going to wear off in this spot anyway, but don’t ya hate it when something like this happens?

I’m glad now that I didn’t get things powder-coated and at least I can touch it things up myself if I need to.

I’m going to have to keep an eye on the foot shells as they’re steel and prone to rust, especially where I live on the coast. It’s ironic that one of the reasons I went with an aluminum droid was because wood warps so easily here, even when sealed, and now here I am worrying about rust from the salt air. I may just grease up this area when I get around to weathering him.

I also noticed that nearly all of my ankle cylinders are scratched up and should really be repainted, but I’m not going to do it this time around.

I used silicon to attach the foot strips to the foot shell. I should probably tap and screw them on, but I’m feeling lazy and really want to see this done. I roughed up the two surfaces and taped on the strip. I’ll probably know tomorrow if it works.

I think it looks pretty cool all put together don’t you think?

One last thing while I remember, don’t forget to use screw Loctite or something similar. I missed a few screws in the feet before C4 and lost nearly all of them by the end of the week.

I’d posted a few weeks ago that I had a problem with the bolts on the Knurled Hose Fittings (KHF) hitting the drive wheel in the foot. Well I finally got around to cutting down the nuts and at the same time making some small nuts for the battery boxes.

For the feet I simply cut the nuts in half and filed them down. Here’s a before and after shot

At first I tried to cut the nuts with a hand saw, but it was slow going so I switched to the dremel

Here they are attached to the foot with the expandable rubber plugs which hold the hose in place

I also had to adjust the holes in the feet to get the foot strip to line up properly. I just used a hand file to remove some material

For the battery boxes I had to grind down the nuts to fit into the tight space.

Nice and snug fit

[edit 12-03-07 – see the following post about the failed rubber plugs on the KHF)