Three Legs

I wanted to get the center leg put in there temporarily so that I could see some of the big relationships and solve some problems. As you can see in some of my earlier posts, I had purposely left the body of the center leg very long.



My idea was that I might be able to rig up some sort of retractability function inside the body and use that extra length. Now I see that there's no room for that--the leg goes way up into the body. It'll get in the way of batteries, electronics, and everything else:


That's why on some of the aluminum R2s with 2-3-2 function, they have the center leg raising on a platform--to preserve some space for R2 guts.

It took me a bit to figure out from the drawings just how high up the center leg rests for the 3 leg position. Then I realized that the top of the center leg is supposed to be flush with top side of the bottom of the frame. (Think about that for a minute.) So I figure I'll chop off the extra length, and mount the center leg on a piece of 3/4" ply, cut to fit the opening in the frame, and mount it there semi-permanently.

Up in here where I've got the temporary cross bracing. (Here's a couple of angles you don't usually see)





I've got a dome ordered from Ron Barklay. And I figure I'll start roughing in the feet next. Originally, I thought I would fashion them out of aluminum--I even bought some to get started. But I'm liking the idea of using something they call expanded cell PVC now. I've got a piece from Interstate Plastics. It seems workable, stiff enough, and pretty easy to manipulate. We will see.