The Skirt Assembly

Errors in the First Design

While I'm a reasonably clever designer, my expertise isn't in mechanical design and I don't have a lot of experience scratch building in styrene.
Sometimes it bites me. This case was one of them.
This was the major problem that I had with the first skirt
design. I used a butt joint where the two pieces of styrene
came together. Even using some heavy duty glue, the joint
wasn't up to taking any reasonable amount or pressure.

Considering that when you lift an R2 the skirt is a natural
place for your hands to grip that would not be good.

on the original design the joint between the two edge
pieces was unsupported except at a rib location
in the revised design the short upper piece extends below
the angled piece to support it along the whole length
of the joint.
The final problem I had involves interpreting the BC drawings
with regard to the angle of the ribs and the angle that
the straight side meets the curved side of the skirt.

Clearly what I had here would not work.
And you'd have thought I would have caught it in the 3D
modeling phase of the design.

Well, as they say, back to the drawing board!

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