DrCyanide
Active Member
Eh... some steps forward, some steps backwards.
The good:
- The cover going front-to-back makes it significantly sturdier. The older prototypes I could flex it and push the lid in, getting it stuck under the ledge it was suppose to rest on. This one is solid.
- The gap between the lid and the cover is very tight. I can barely get a fingernail in on both sides of it. It was slightly tighter, but I was trying to fix some minor snagging so I trimmed plastic off pretty much every joint. (Side note: to keep that gap in the final product I won't be able to paint the sides of the lid or cover - which means I'll need to print them out of either silver or red)
- The rocket size is much better. It's about as big as I can go without completely redesigning how I print them. (Fun fact, they already have cut outs in the back, so they can fit around the moving parts. This gives them the illusion that they're longer than they really are)
- The thicker hinges haven't shown any signs of cracking. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I finally have them just thick enough.
The bad:
- The servo linkage is too hit-or-miss right now. Previous iteration barely closed all the way, this one doesn't. Need a better hole position, possibly some sort of slot that I fill in with glue to accommodate for minor variation in linkage arm sizes.
- The holes that I didn't re-enforce did break. Most troubling, the hole holding the servo broke clean in half. While writing this up I realized that the back side is also broken, splitting the base into two parts.The connections between the lid and it's hinges broke as well.
- Servo compartment was just a hair too tight. Not sure how much of this was due to swapping servos for this test, but regardless it should be fixed.
- Cover connections need a lot of fine tuning. Too tight, caused a lot of broken parts before I just hot glued them in place.
- Rockets are only held on by hot glue. I tried printing a pin for them to hold onto, but that didn't work (pin snapped when trying to trim it down to size). Still the shape of the rocket and the platform connection does a decent job of lining the two up. The "fix" might be just removing the pin and hole all together.
- The rocket nosecone just looks bad.... need a cosmetic redesign.
The untested:
- Added little loops at the front and back of the base. The idea is to eventually connect these loops to two rings, which will preserve the spacing and alignment between the rockets. Since the forearm curves a bit it might be a better fit if the rockets bend forward (or backwards) slightly, and that could be achieved by having a different sized ring at the front or the back.
- Didn't get around to testing my servo controller. It didn't make much sense to test it with only one servo running, since it would have just added more wires and troubleshooting into the mix.
So yeah, lots of tweaking to do.
Side note: It has crossed my mind that you could flip the mechanism around and use it for different costume ideas.
For example, if you wanted to make a Pacific Rim style rocket-punch, you could flip the design around and swap out the missiles attachment for a booster rocket attachment.
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