Legs 9: Finishing touches

Several small things finished up in the last few days on the legs. First, I needed to cut the second 2.5+" pocket in the bottom of the shoulder hub pocket. After fooling around a bit, I remembered my technique from before. The easiest way to do this is to set a router bit down to the right depth plus a bit, and then just freehand the inner circle out. There's not much you can mess up, and the pocket won't show, so the freehand line won't be a problem.



I'm all about fast and efficient, and this was both. The results:



I think the plans call for 1.34" depth on the shoulder hub. I cut this to 1.4" or so. There will be some variation on the resin or the aluminum shoulder hubs that the club produces. I couldn't get mine off my droid to check. But I think that the resin hubs will fit, or if they don't, the backs can be trimmed and sanded a bit. And there should be clearance here for the aluminum hubs too. If not, a bit of dremeling could bring the levels down for a good fit. The hubs should fit flush to the face of the body of the leg.

Then I spent some time trimming, sanding and cleaning up the under shoulder detail pockets:



After painting, the wood grain and some chiseling will show inside of these if someone was really looking for it, but it would be hard to spot. I think if a builder wants the inside behind the greeblie to have a really clean look, a piece of styrene, maybe .020, cut to fit and glued back there would polish it just fine. That would take 5 minutes.

And now after some finish sanding down to 320 grit, and some filling in a few odd spots, these are ready for a coat of primer:



The primer makes any chips, dings, gouges, or gaps that I have missed so far immediately obvious. So I'll let this dry over night, fill some remaining spots, do a light finish sanding, and then one more coat of primer and these are ready to ship out.

I've completed that process on the center leg and they are ready to go out.





Any remaining wood grain will be covered by paint. At this point on my droid's legs, I layered on several coats of primer, sanding lightly between each coat with 320 or 400 grit, and then I built up several layers of gloss white, sanding between the early ones. The layers and sanding will progressively fill and cover any remaining micro wood grain texture to the point that the finished surface will be complete glassy and smooth. But I'm leaving that to the guys who bought these from me. Final steps tomorrow, and then shipping early next week.