Level Headed

Weekend warrior time. Decided to go ahead and cut the Com8-B frame for the ankle adapter. As you can see in earlier posts, the center foot wasn't sitting level, something a few other builders were experiencing with this frame. So James in Texas made an adapter plate that required a little sawing on the bottom ring of the frame.

So, I started by attaching the center ankle and marking its outline in red sharpie. I also marked the skirt's outline in blue just so I'd see placement of things.

Next, I proceeded to drill 4 holes in each corner of the ankle marking. I checked the jigsaw blades I have to determine what size drill bit to use. Didn't want to go too small or too large, but just big enough to fit the blade in.

Then I used the jigsaw to cut along the perimeter from hole to hole. The key here was to take it fairly slow, taking breaks in between each cut to rest the hands. That vibrating jigsaw can do a number on you.

Once that was done there was a nice big hole in the bottom of the frame. Always a little scary cutting something you've spent a good chunk of change on. I used the dremel to sand the rough edge and file a couple spots where the blade floated a little.

After all that I spent a good deal of time staring at and trying to figure out the process for attaching the new ankle adapter to the frame. James really hadn't given much instruction at the time these came out last year. The plate was made to attach to the frame with the same bolts that attach the skirt. He'd released a few photos of the adapter plate but not with it attached to the frame with the skirt on as well. Nothing seemed like it made much sense when it came right down to it. I perused the boards but no one had mentioned how they assembled everything, only that they had experienced the same default and one builder had said the adapter plate fixed the situation.

So after many attempts at installing it how James had displayed the nuts in the photos, I decided to give it another go a different way. I put a lock washer, then two bolts then another lock washer on the plate itself, screwing the first nut/lock washer tight. Then I pulled the bolts through the upside down bottom ring of the frame. It stayed in place from the tension of the bolts.

Now came the really hard part of trying to connect the skirt to these bolts. The only way I could get around it was to hold the skirt in position, while trying to look up into the gap between frame and skirt and getting the bolt and standoff/coupler inside the skirt to line up. One at a time I lined each of the four bolts up and turned them just enough to get a bite on the skirt standoffs. You can see below just how hard that really is.

Once all four were barely attached, I turned the whole frame right side up and let gravity do some work for me. I proceeded to use my handy right angle ratchet to screw the bolts down more. The key here was to do a little on each at a time to keep the whole thing level. I really wasn't sure how far up into the frame the ankle needed to go so I stopped around 5/8ths of an inch, which was the apparent thickness of the ankle connectors. Then I used a open ended wrench to tighten the now bottom nuts/lock washers down. I was able to do fine tweaking by tightening the bottom nut or the screw itself to level the whole plate out.

Next I reattached the center ankle which now sits up inside the frame itself.

The now arduous task of attaching the legs by oneself began. This time I tried keeping the frame upside down and attaching the legs, which seemed slightly easier but still quite a task. So much of one, in fact I decided to start a thread asking how other builders went about this phase of assembly. Hopefully I'll get some good feedback and someone will have an easier method.

After all that was done I flipped the whole thing back to right side up to see how it faired. There was definite improvement. The outer feet still dont seem to be in the extreme position against the ankles. But the center foot is slightly more level. Before it was about a half inch higher in the front. Now its only about 3/16ths higher. I think that can be fixed by pushing the center ankle a little farther up into the frame. But that will have to wait for another day. Once I establish the correct height of the adapter plate I may look at getting standoffs of that length to make the whole thing a little easier.

One more task of Artoo building down. Quite a few more to go.