Hi All,
One of my colleagues hurt his back moving a load of hard core and turned up at work with one of those adjustable crutches made of tubular aluminium. It struck me that the adjustment mechanism was like that on the old Silver Sabre I'm restoring; two sprung buttons that pop through holes in the outer tube. I measured the inner tube and it's 22mm diameter, the same as plastic overflow pipe. After asking around I managed to get hold of one of these crutches for nothing. Overflow pipe is a perfect fit, and it was easy to drill for the sprung buttons. Now I have an adjustable stem with a plastic lower section. I've put a T-joint on the lower end (pushed on for now, but it will be glued) with a short length of pipe on either side going through a pipe clip of the type used to fasten the pipe to the wall, or in my case, the coil housing. I'll need to find plastic screws for this. The other end of the stem has an adjustable forearm support and a sort of upside-down pistol grip. The angle of that isn't quite as I'd like it but it will do for now. The outer tube is 25.5mm diameter so 25mm conduit clips might be close enough for fastening the electronics box to it.
My thousand feet of red Kynar wire arrived this week so I'm thinking about the coil now. I've got access to a laser cutter which I'm going to use to make the former out of 3mm plywood or MDF. It can cut intricate shapes very accurately, many times over, without getting bored and with relatively few fires, considering...
Cheers for now,
John