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Friday, June 8, 2007

Happiness is pursuing hairbrained schemes




I was thinking today how lucky I am to be able to tinker and create my R2 any way I want without worry of what anyone thinks. There's a million ways to solve problems and I see a lot of builders (me included often) follow the pack and do what everyone else does. Occasionally it's nice to come up with a unique way of doing things.

Today I had an unconventional idea how to mount a piece of wood and aluminum bracket inside the front ankle of R2. For economy sake, I always try to use whatever is already in the garage. So I pulled a couple jugs with leftover resin from an old project and mixed up a fresh batch. It was poured into the ankle cavity with the mounting mechanisms already installed. I'm guessing that it's going to be a nice tight fit and probably won't even need screws to hold it all together. The inside of the ankles is rough fiberglass. It takes 2 hours to dry so we'll see.

It was kind of a mess as I forgot how much this stuff expands. But I was prepared for a mess this time (remembering the resin incident 2 years ago while making B9 parts). A tray was there to catch the runoff and plenty of paper towels and gloves were on hand.

The pictures are a little rough but after sanding the top smooth, I'll have a system where I can remove the front leg with by quickly removing a single bolt. The floor of the R2 has the hole cut out for the hole mounting mechanism using a couple scrap pieces of aluminum angle iron I bought one day thinking they would come in handy.

The parts in the picture are still rough but once I determine they'll work they will be cleaned up and painted. Also note that under the square aluminum bracket a block of wood is attached and surrounded by the resin.

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