Foot Channel

I'm going to back up a little bit here in my description of the building of the foot drive. As mentioned earlier the large aluminum tube would be used to house the wheels and the small aluminum tube would be the channel used to connect the wheel housing to the leg itself. Describing the how to cut the channel really depends on the foot shells being used. The channel is designed to fit inside the shell and be the pivot point for the leg/ankle and foot. Since the different foot shells have varying thicknesses the length of the channel would be affected by this. The channel is cut on both end of the tube at the same angle that the wheel housing would be cut and the top of the tube is cut off to make it a channel so the leg/ankle can slide in.

Foot Channel with ends cut to proper angles

I test fit the channel with the wheel housing in my styrene foot shell to make sure that everything lines up. This picture below should really show what is attempting to be done here.

Test Fit of Channel and Wheel housing

When the test fit is good and everything is where you want it to be, you need to drill the pivot holes where the leg/ankle will connect to the foot. Based on other builders plans I went with a 1/2" hole for the pivot hole and used a reducer bushing to take the size down to 3/8". Once the pivot holes were drilled, I centered the channel the best I could on the top of the wheel housing, drilled some holes, and fastened them together using some hex bolts.

Channel and wheel housing bolted together

That's about it for now. Still more to come on building the footdrive...