Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Leg Attachment Details

While Amos was madly drilling and reaming, I cut and drilled aluminum straps which would be used to attach the aluminum tees to the legs, which we'd made of pine. (Amos did some of the work on these straps too.)

I plan to replace the pine with poplar, but we decided to use the pine for the initial build, in case we wanted to change something, because pine is a little cheaper than poplar so it would be less painful to throw it out if the original parts didn't work.

It took some fiddling and trial and error to find the lengths we wanted for the aluminum straps to get the pedal heights and angles just right.

I wanted to make the pedal unit low enough that I would be resting my heels on the floor, but Amos voted for using a heel platform across the tops of the "feet", the 1x2 strips of pine that bolt to the bottoms of the legs. He felt this would raise the overall unit, giving a more natural angle when you're sitting in a chair, and requiring less tilt on the pedal unit to get the pedals at just the right angle.

We don't have the height adjustment relative to the floor that Todd's production design does, but we do have some angle adjustment, both at the leg attach brackets and by changing the length of the pedal pushrods.

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