Re: Tiger 1 road wheels [TANKS]

[George Mastoras <idiom-at-optusnet.com.au>]

Regarding the construction method used on the tracks.

There is a few steps involved in how I made them but to answer your question
the way they are held together is by removing all the pins from your chain
so you end up with a pile of bits and then join it up with long pins that
are the complete width of your track.

The rubber I have used is also cloth reinforced for strength.
So far they have worked a treat and have an added bonus of behaving and
sounding like the real thing. They even squeek at low speeds.
Also the weight of the tracks is fairly accurate compared with the weight of
the tank as a percentage so it behaves very accurately and can tolerate a
fair bit of track slackness.

With this method its also possible to match the drive sprockets teeth to the
real tank its based on, eg. If you wanted to copy a tank with a 12 tooth
drive sprocket you would buy 4 x 24 tooth sprockets and remove every second
tooth, You could then pretty much match the amount of tracks links for
accuracy. Obviously this would only work on certain tanks, probably not
prewar German tanks but more like the Paton, Pershing, MBT70, Leopard,
Sherman, etc.

You can also replace any part of the track or lengthen it as its made up of
links, tracks in the photo are made up of 91 links atm, used to be 90 until
I moved wheel positioning.

Track height is 12mm without the track guides and 3 inches wide, these
figures can be changed to suit very easy.



on 26/6/06 3:46 AM, David Cansler at dcans-at-verizon.net wrote:

> George
> 
> What was the construction method for those tracks?
> I see that you've used chain on both sides, but how is put together?
> They lood unusual.
> 
> David "I have 10 false starts" Cansler
> Florida
> 
> George Mastoras wrote:
> 
>> What the alternating directions of the road wheel arms did was allow
>> the torsion bars to run through the entire width of the hull
>> internally. The interleaved road wheels meant that the arms where
>> closer together than say a T34  so by flipping the arms on one side
>> and lining up the road wheels the internal suspension set up would fit
>> rather neatly with no overlapping of springs.
>> 
>> If you are not using torsion bars for springs then you donąt need to
>> do it.
>> 
>> Heres an early pic of when I was playing around with  this type of
>> suspension se tup.
>> 
>> http://www.robowars.org/forum/album_pic.php?pic_id=1035&sid=1b6b5483054ea6388
>> 567fa60cc5a44cf
>> 
>> Itąs a bit cheesy but it shows the mechanics of the Tigers suspension
>> system.
>> 
>> The layout is based on a king tiger ­ having one more arm and wheel
>> per side for a total of 18 arms. As you can see from how the springs
>> run parallel together that it couldnąt be done if the arms where
>> symmetrical.
>> 
>> The other difference with this system is that you basically use the
>> whole floor for suspension with little height lost but you keep your
>> complete width.
> 
>