The original plan was to have the caterpillar tracks of roughly triangular shape, but the nature of using scrap wood as a construction material rather changed that, so I went for more of a lozenge-shape, more akin to World War One tanks...
The tracks were cut from a mix of ply from the old piece of furniture, and some offcuts at work which were too ropy for the kids to use in their GCSE pieces. As mentioned before, a marvellous benefit of doing this project when I was working as a D+T Techie was that I had access to vast quantities of free offcuts of wood, even if (as above) some of it was rather odd.
Not long after this point I hit a snag (yes! Another one!), and a pretty serious one at that, with the fact that the projections that would slot into said caterpillar tracks would make the chassis out of gauge in the back of the car. After some head scratching, and briefly toying with the idea of having it all hang out of the open windows of the car, I decided to turn the concept on its head, and bolt projections onto the backs of the caterpillar tracks which would slot into the body- this would have the added bonus of making the boiler sit a little higher too.
Attaching the projecting pieces onto the backs of the cat-tracks was a bit of a nightmare, as I realised they would be supporting pretty much all of the weight of the rest of the monster. A somewhat belt-and-braces approach was taken to attaching these parts, again, with dozens of screws, hot glue, you name it…
Hopefully this picture shows how it all works; the T-shaped bit in the middle, under the bin/boiler, is all part of the main body of the Jabberwock, the two darker boxes alongside the shaft of the T-shape are boxes bolted to the rear of the caterpillar tracks, which allow the whole thing to hang of those track modules.
No comments:
Post a Comment