License to Drive

Spent the weekend doing various things on Artoo. First I took him all apart, so he's not standing on his own legs anymore. I'm going to do some work on the skins again in an attempt to get some white painting done before the heat of summer gets here. So they're screwed/clamped back on the frame at the moment. 

I looked through my box of blue painted parts and wet sanded some of the ones that needed touchup. The first three pieces turned out good, then the next three looked pretty cloudy and flat, so I'm holding off till it cools down a little this evening to do anymore. It was in the low 80s this afternoon, but felt a little warmer in the garage while I was painting.

After re-reading every post I could find about center foot casters, I proceeded to order a couple sets from Lowe's website yesterday since they weren't available at any local store. Hopefully one, or a combo of these will work.

I decided to tackle the foot drives this afternoon. I followed this tutorial, so I can't take any credit for originality.

Here's the steel foot shell and foot drive.

I took the large wheel out to get access to the screw holes, then placed the mount inside the foot shell.

Then I took a blue sharpie and marked all 6 holes. I also took a pencil and circled it around the hole too. The angle makes it look like the outer marks are off center, but they are not.

I center punched the marks and then drilled a small hole first just in case.

They all lined up just fine after putting the bracket back in for a visual inspection.

So then I drilled the holes out larger. First I used a 1/4 inch bit which should be large enough. I was having a little trouble getting them all to go in with ease, so I went ahead and used a 5/16 inch bit to help loosen it up. I wish I didn't have to and that they had lined up perfectly with the 1/4 inch hole, but it should be fine. Then I put the large wheel back in the foot drive bracket and screwed the whole thing in from the top/outside with the 1/4-20 screws Jerry provided.

Like the tutorial I followed, I may end up getting the low profile flush style screws and countersinking them. The bulky screws take away a little in my opinion.

One thing I noticed after I had the drive in was that the smaller back caster wheel in the drive needed to be lowered because the foot wasn't sitting level. I figure I'll fix this one later since I'd have to remove it to do so, but I went ahead and leveled out the other foot drive. It was fairly easy. I loosened the two screws using a T-bar allen wrench through the two holes in bracket. Then I sat the whole drive upside down and put a metal ruler across both wheels. Then, I used my trusty Dollar Store level to check the position of the small caster wheel and then tightened it down.

One foot drive down, one to go. With the new center casters coming this week I'll hopefully have all the wheels figured out and done soon. Then I'll have to go ahead and order the NPC motors and get busy on some electronics side of things. Can't wait for that first test drive!