horseshoes

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had things I wasn’t happy with in the horseshoes. The ribs inside the inner circle were not eve, due to some issues when routing.

I decided to fix this, using a totally different approach.

First off, I sanded off the irregularities in the fork “tines” of the horseshoe:

Much better. Next step was to sand down the entire rounded portion of the inner perimeter.. This needed to be sanded down at least 1 mm in total… and still be round.

This took a while, but kept a perfect circle!

Next step was to glue a 0.5 mm thick piece of styrene around the inner circle and the “inserts”, to make them absolutely smooth and flat.

Once the glue had set, I sanded off the edges… looks pretty good so far!

I guess that what really made me want to start on the horseshoes today, was this package that arrived from Ryan H, containing these goodies:

I sanded the cavities for the buttons and hydraulics, made a paper template of the hole in order to center the holes properly, drilled and countersunk and .. well .. I just HAD to try them out immediately!

Once the circular piece and the side pieces were glued in place, I cut off 3mm styrene strips of 0.5mm thick styrene, to glue inside the horseshoe to get the right ridged edge. This time without the anomalies I had previously. I started with the side pieces to act as a guide for the circular pieces. In the picture below, you can also see that I’ve glued in the pieces along the edge in the circular part as well.

Once I had the edges and the leading-in side pieces, I just glued the remaining pieces in. These were all done by freehand, bye eyeballing it, but I really think it turned out great. As long as the glue needs a little while to set properly, there is plenty of time to adjust. Not too bad, eh?

This looks a LOT better than it did before.

Next off, I sanded the bottom pieces to be ridged as well, as I had left this part out when I originally made the horseshoes.

So: Aluminum bits in place, the ridges looks nice. This horseshoe is done. There is however one more thing I need to fix..

The shoulder shim. It had not been sitting exactly where it should be, making the horseshoe sit a few mm higher than the shoulder, plus that it should be aluminum.

I spent a good 20 minutes working back and forth with mounting the shim on and off, and working in small increments with a round file in order to expand the holes to be just right. Next step: Aluminum edges!

I took my aluminum tape that I’ve used to skin my shoulder hubs (Another thing to fix later on: Skin the shoulder hubs with real 0.3mm aluminum for a better look) and cut it in thin stripes and wrapped them around the edge.

Once this was done, I re-attached the shim to the horseshoe, and finally placed it back onto the leg. R2 now has a left leg that looks much better!

Yeah … seeing these pictures really makes me cringe with the foil tape on the shoulder hub. That has GOT to change.

Oh, and the blue color, is not the final one. It is just a temporary color I had in the house, since I needed the booster covers blue for midsummer’s…

So: I’m halfway through fixing up the second horseshoe, hopefully get that done by tomorrow!

//Micke