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Building - Arms Pt. 1

Building the arms was by far the most time-consuming task. If only I had a cnc....



The rim of wood around the bearing was needed but I didn't like the really thick arm, I drew this up in Fusion, printed out the drawing, and stuck it down with a glue stick. The slot in the middle was an idea to make the arms lighter and look cooler. I tried it with one arm and then ditched the idea, it really didn't work and was a lot of work.



All cut-out, at this point I didn't have access to a scroll saw so this was all done with a regular handsaw and files. It's pretty rough but I cleaned it up as best I could.



Already looking much better.



The next step was mass production, I needed 20 arms total. For this, I bought a used Craftsman Scroll saw. It was very, very useful.



All cut and drilled out.



Removing the paper was annoying, I used the top edge of a file to scrape it off. Since I put it on with a glue stick it wasn't very difficult to scrape off.



All 20 arms cut, drilled, and sanded. 



Painted black. I used gloss black and later put a matte UV resistant clear coat on top. The matte looks far better than the gloss.



Bearings placed in.

Now it was time to glue all the bearings in. Before I started mixing epoxy I cleaned the outside of all the bearings with alcohol.


The black is all oil that came off a single bearing. The epoxy should get a much better grip on the metal with all that oil gone.


Then it was time for epoxy. Because of the very short cure time I had to do this is small batches, I could only do 4 bearings per batch.
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