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| Foot Pedals |
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When I first looked at the construction process for the foot pedals I
thought they would take a couple of hours to complete. It seemed so simple.
However as with many of the RW processes, things aren't always as they
appear. It looked like after manufacturing the two scissor beams, the
rest would easily slip together. Well, read on to get the rest of the
story.
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Here are the two scissor beams after manufacture. The aluminum scissors
started out as rectangular flat stock with the bushing holes already in
place. I was really pleased at the finished look of the scissor beams
after sawing, drilling, filing and fine brushing them. I think I'm getting
better at manufacturing aluminum parts.
The aluminum bushing plug that fits into the nylon bushing needs to protrude
10 thousands of an inch so the bushing rotates freely when the plug is
bolted to the frame. You can see the plug uninstalled in the scissor beam
in the foreground while the one in the back ground is completely assembled
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As it turns out, the plugs were not long enough to protrude 10 thousands
of an inch through the bushings. I used a pad sander with 150 grit paper
to sand the bushing for the proper clearance. It was no big deal.
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The one thing that threw me on this assembly was the
foot pedal castings would not slide onto the pedal shaft. The inside diameter
of the pedal was too small. RW doesn't say anything about this in any
of the documentation. It took me a while to figure out how to hone out
that large area without a honing stone. I came up with the Handy Dandy
Home Made Broom Stick Hone.
Wow, don't you just love that greasy garage hair look?
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| This is a picture of how I made the Handy Dandy
Home Made Broom Stick Hone. I used 150 grit sticky back sand paper to wrap
around a broom stick. I added popsicle sticks to adjust the diameter as
needed. As you can see in the picture above, I continued to rotate the foot
pedal on the HDHMBSH until I got the proper diameter. Even though it was
a little slow, it worked great. Huumm, I need to include this in my tools
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Once I got the pedals installed, I used a straight edge to get them properly
aligned. It was a simple matter of adjusting the link connecting to the
scissor beams.
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Here you can see the foot pedal assembly completed. I really enjoyed
building this assembly even though I was aggravated by having to hone
out the pedals to fit on the shaft. I'm finally getting used to the idea
that RW doesn't always tell you every thing and when the RW video states
"assemble as shown", it's not always that simple. It only took
me about 5 hours to do what I thought would be a two hour job. I probably
spent more time on finishing the scissor beams than I needed to; but I'm
very pleased with the end result.
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