Sunday, May 29, 2016

Shoulder Hubs

 

The next thing I want to show is how I built the shoulder hubs. There seems to be two parts on a droid that are referred to as shoulder hubs. The first is show here, that silver part within the shoulder horse shoes:

R2_Shoulder - Copy

The part I will be talking about in the next couple posts is this one, the hub that attaches the legs to the body.

ShoulderHub2

After doings some research I found that attaching the legs to the body was one of the trickier parts of building a droid. The legs need to be able to rotate so that the droid can be switched from two leg position to three leg and when in two leg position all the weight of the droid in on this connection point. One of the most popular ways of doing this is what is called the “gas pipe method”. To do this, two different size steel gas pipes are used, one screwed into a flange on each leg and then slipped inside each other. The hard part turns out to be finding pipes that will slide into each other but not be to loose. You will find that these pipes often have a ridge down the inside of the pipe that prevent them from filling together.

I eventually found pipes that will work at Home Depot, but did a slight variation of this method. Instead of using two different size pipes on the legs, I used the same size, and then used a third large pipe to connect them together. Here is what the finished product will look like.

DSC01645

Here is a diagram of the hubs I built. It starts with a metal pipe flange that the pipes will eventually screw into. The flange is sandwiched between two plywood discs and bolted to the one that is closest to the leg. The entire assembly is then bolted to the leg with t-nuts installed on the leg. In my next post I will start to describe how I made the hubs.

HubDiagram

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