Continued slow progress. Those who know me will attest I do most of my work in brief bursts of energy, which get fewer and farther apart as I get older. The long lulls between give me a chance to reflect on past mistakes and plan ahead a little. I spent a bit of time over the winter precision grinding the spindles previously welded to the leg verticals. The weld bead on top and bottom prevented the spindle brackets (which will be in turn welded to the frame body) from fully turning through their 180° of motion without binding, so they needed to be (very carefully) ground down. Now, with the kingpin installed, they move freely.
Another disadvantage of long builds, especially ones that start without a real plan, is design specs change and sometimes one has to backtrack and fix something. Early on, I had planned three spindles per leg with 5" bolts as kingpins. Later, I decided to use four spindles per leg, and found the 5" bolts would not longer fit between the spindles for installation. This forced me to change (fix #1) to one long, continuous kingpin, installed from the top. Alignment of individual spindles is critical, as the kingpin cannot "bend" if it has to make a course correction going down multiple holes in sequence. Also, I had made a jig for the legs (since I have to make 2 and I want them to be the same). The jig uses small scraps of wood blocks to keep the metal in position for welding. I had used 2 blocks on the spindle side of the leg upright, which was fine as they would have fit between the three spindles. When I changed to four spindles, the blocks are now in the wrong spots. A couple taps with a chisel (fix #2) and the wood pops off, taking chunks of MDF with them. A little sanding and wood filler and ready to add new blocks.
My "Problem Shock" reference* applies here as well. The interior space of each leg gets some cross bracing to distribute forces (like a truss bridge). Angles are gonna be tricky to cut, as the sway brace sits at 70°, so the bottoms of the internal bracing is 45° and the tops are either 25° or 65°, depending on which way the bracing faces, and length (interior to the leg) is critical. Anybody out there with a ninth-grader in High School Geometry that can check my math?
* - I took credit for this observation in August 2011 in my recycling container odd-roc build thread. In his 1970 book, Alvin Toffler defined "future shock" as a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time". The accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from stress and disorientation. Here is the connection to rocketry. When you build a kit, the directions are laid out in a logical order, basically engineered for ease of assembly. In scratch-building, however, as you run into problems, they get deferred. Eventually, when all the fun, easy to do stuff is finished, all you have left are the problems and they pile up in front of you like a giant wall.