For the past few days I’ve been continuing work on the Zaku knee joints. The design of this assembly and the mechanical arrangement for the knee armor goes back to the early days of the project, and it’s still something I take pride in. But at the same time I am kind of anxious to wrap it up and focus on other parts of the legs. Maybe within the last 10 days of the 100 day challenge I can even build the hip and waist joints needed to connect the legs to the rest of the build and have a look at the Zaku in a largely-complete state.

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I’ve been continuing work on the Zaku’s knee joint parts. The components are simple in principle but it is a bit tricky to build joint parts with the appropriate mechanical precision. Today I made a lot of progress on the lower portion of the joint: the portion of the hinge that attaches to the lower leg, and the strut which will carry the knee armor.

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It’s been about a week since the last update: part of that was because on the weekend I went to an electronics flea market: prep for that kept me busy for a bit, as did testing out the stuff I got afterward. But beyond that, I started working on the knee joint, and it took me some time to make headway on it. While this part is well-defined at this point (being one of the parts for which I have already made a 3D printable model) in some ways the structure is a bit complex: being a joint, it needs some degree of mechanical precision. It’s also got kind of a sparse interior structure and irregular contours. After struggling with it for a bit I finally powered through enough to create the first part of the joint.

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It’s been a bit of a slump with this 100 day challenge in recent weeks and this week is no exception. But part of the challenge is to just keep going, even if things aren’t working out quite how they’re supposed to.
Previously I used epoxy putty to create hollow copies of the upper leg part from a rubber mold. The process was a bit experimental and due to quality problems with the castings I wasn’t sure if I was going to actually use them. I’ve made up my mind that I will use them, so for the past couple sessions I’ve been working on smoothing them out. I did some gap filling on them and now I’m sanding them to get them smooth again.

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Although there’s no shortage of things that needs to be done on this project, sometimes it’s still hard to figure out what to do when I sit down to work on it. Today I decided to work on the thruster openings on the hips and the snout.

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Today I separated the mold halves for the upper leg and used epoxy putty to make hollow copies of the part. I also added a bit of missing detail to the sole of the foot.

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Today I poured the second half of the upper leg mold and made some headway on the top of the foot:

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My track record with the 100 day challenge has been rather poor lately. Tonight I got back into it and turned my attention to the leg parts.

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Since I’ve made good headway with the torso I think it might be a good time to get back to the arm, try to get it to a point where it can be integrated into the overall build. First up, the hand:

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I didn’t get a lot of time in tonight and I’m at one of those points in the project where I’m not super-sure how to proceed. But I was able to check the completed midriff joint now that the epoxy putty is cured, do a little refinement there, and start on a bit of work on the hip part.

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