Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Building the Dewey Drone from "Silent Running" (1972) - Part IV: Legs and Feet and Toes

 previous posts in this series: 

 - Building the Dewey Drone from "Silent Running" (1972) - Part I: Getting Started

 - Building the Dewey Drone from "Silent Running" (1972) - Part II: Main Body and Sides

 - Building the Dewey Drone from "Silent Running" (1972) - Part III: Adding Details 

 - Building the Dewey Drone from "Silent Running" (1972) - Part V: Painting and Assembly


So far, I built all of Dewey's body, including all the details. Now, I proceed with the legs, feet, and toes.


The Feet

The feet are simply two little flat boxes, with slits on the top to connect the joints coming from the leg.




The Legs

Here are all the pieces for one leg.


The edges of the long pieces are sanded to 22.5 degrees.





The Joints

I wanted Dewey's legs to come out at an angle, so I designed these angled joints from which one sits between the leg and the foot,



and the other one between the leg and the body (the piece on the right in the following image). 


The Toes

I did not see how I could possibly build the toes with a laser cutter, so these are made by hand starting with a table saw and  a miter saw. Each foot gets three smaller toes, plus one larger toe for the front side. The sides are cut at an angle of 10 degrees and the top side is sanded to achieve the slightly curved shape.




The lines are then cut with a hand saw,


and the toes are glued to the feet (after the edges of the feet were sanded to get the nice curved shapes).
 

And here is the complete legs & feet & toes unit. These will be glued later, after painting.


Now, all wooden pieces are there. 


Sanding

The next step is sanding. While this is a lot of work, there aren't any photos. So, let me just provide this one of the tools that I used.


All the Wooden Pieces

So, here is the overview of all of Dewey's wooden pieces.



The next step is: Painting and Assembly

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