Something I’ve realized over the past year where I’ve been building my R2, is that I really love scratch building things from styrene.
Styrene is very forgiving, and once you’ve learned how, making things is actually quite easy!
Today’ I set out to build a small silly piece with lots of weird angles and stuff: An ankle Wedge! (Actually I built two of them, but who’s couting… I need 4 in total, so halfway there… unless I cave in and use the two resin ones that I do have laying around…)
Anyway, back on track! The ankle wedge is a small piece that is sitting on the bottom of the legs, holding the Ankle Cylinder.
I’ve previously built my ankle cylinders out of PVC pipe and styrene, and even though they still need a bit of work, they sit good enough on my robot in order to me to make the wedges!
These are the main pieces. A big piece of styrene, with no straight angles. The short edge will be closest to the ankle, and the big end will rest on the cylinder. The sides are made up by small triangular pieces. I’ve cut out larger triangles, measure, then place a piece of extra pipe on top my 1mm styrene piece and cut around it (had to cut a few times to get the proper fit) to get the right curve.
This is really a try/test/try/test again sort of procedure in order to get these to sit snug, but after a few test tries, I did get my triangular piece to sit pretty spot on to the cylinder.
Once the triangular pieces are made (be sure to mark them properly so you know which side is which, what is in, what is out, etc) I chamfered the long edge of the flat styrene piece, to make it look good on the cylinder. Then glue time!
Two pieces of tape to hold the triangles to the large piece of styrene, and then just glue it all down!
Once the glue set, I added another piece in the center, just for stability.
Then time to use my secret instrument to make it fit really well…
No, not THAT kind of instrument. It’s not a plastic didgeridoo!
However, the PVC pipe with a piece of sand paper strapped on to it, makes for a perfect tool to sand the little wedge to remove any irregularities after glueing it all together!
Finally, let’s end this brief tutorial with taking a look at the results!
Nice and smooth! Now I just need to paint them blue and set aside as finished!
Oh yeah.. need to make another two… unless I use them old resin ones.. I kinda like these better, and they fit SO much nicer…
