Apollo Era Crawler

[romanmodels]

good work as allways Gene you have mastered the cleats!.

[spacerunner]

Hello Gene,
I admire your perseverance and ambition to struggle through your way through Mischa's monster kit.

You're the Last Crawler Mohican, hold on and keep going step by step. I am amazed how exactly you are building these lots of track links. It is a tough job and you still have some work to do, but it looks fantastic.

I stay tuned and want to see more.

[gene1772]

Greetings all, I am working on the crawler trucks and have built several sections so I just thought I would bring those of you following this build up to date. After the center structure (last post) the next section is the Bearing Housing and this is basically made up of two sections, the internal support and the outer cover (crawler 138- 141) The construction of this was not too difficult but once you move to the cabling and the actual roller bearings it begins to get very time consuming and small. I found making the roller bearings a challenge because I could not find anything that matched them in size. I did not have a punch that was the same as the face-plate on the bearing and did not have anything the exact diameter of the roller section (crawler 142). All the roller bearing face-plates needed to be cut by scissors and glued to the cylinder body. It was tough to keep them round and place the face-plates in the right spot for gluing. The wiring was far and away the most difficult portion of the build. These were very narrow and required significant time and patience to cut and place properly on the bearing housing. Once all external parts are added to the housing they really make the structure stand out. (Crawler 143) The next section is the belt tightener and Idler support rollers, These will keep the tracks tight and support them as they roll over the top of the truck. Again a lot of round objects, the actual construction is not hard just very time consuming because you are working, once again, with magnifiers and tweezers. (Crawler 144-147) There were several parts on the support rollers that I did not add here because they were just too small, raised bolt heads the size of a pencil point, I have no way to cut them out so I had to skip them. Further, several of the tubes (like the hydraulic cylinder that push the tightener) are too small to roll so I had to make my own. Mine were a little larger than the ones that came with the kit but I think they came out well. Finally, Crawler 148 is the completed section. In the interest of time and space I left a great deal out in both construction issues and photos so if you have any questions please PM me and I will be glad to help. Now I move on to the next section, “The Gear Case”. Thanks for looking.

[spacerunner]

Hi Gene,
and great progress with the trucks, really amazing.
But what at a lot of round discs with different diameters you have to cut, therefore I do not envy you.

This is possible with a scissors only up to a certain diameter, maybe up to 2 mm, but even that is difficult.
As I know from Mischa, but partly also discs less than 1 mm in diameter are needed for the trucks. For this you need then a good Punch & Die Set like this:


Source: umm-usa.com
This would help you guaranteed, then you need the last levels with the tiny discs not leave and it looks even better.

I'll get me the tool, although it is not cheap ($55.99), but a friend has it presented to me at an exhibition and has punched discs with 0.5 mm diameter from Styrene, which looked great, and one as the other.

It seems you're on the right track and can reach the destination of completing the crawler, and this is a great challenge to be mastered only a few guys.

[romanmodels]

nice good work on the trucks

[gene1772]

Greeting all, happy holidays. Progress has been a little slow because of the holidays but I wanted to post an update for those who are interested. I have completed the next stage of the crawler which is the gear case. The cases were fairly straight forward but the number (16) to be constructed made this section take some time. For this step I built one complete item as a test build to work out the construction bugs then built the remaining 15. For the curved part in the front of the gear case I found a 15 mm diameter dowel rode worked perfect as a former. I just folded the skin against the rod and the sides slip right in. This worked very well. Once forming the curves were figured out, the next couple of steps went fairly quick and easy. The Gear Case section, like the last one, contained some parts that were just too small for me to construct well and the ones that posed the most difficulty were the circles. After making several failed attempts to construct these pieces I decided to switch tactics. I used a punch on a piece of pressed board to make the circular pieces and used a marker to match the grey color. I know it is kind of cheating but this is a fairly visible part of the model and I was just not happy with the appearance of the circles I formed. I think the switch was worth it. Anyway, here is the completed crawler truck to this point (bottom and side). Now I move on to the motors and again, small parts and 16 of them but since I am on Christmas break I can spend some real time on them and should be done in less time than the gear boxes took. Will keep you posted. Happy New Year, thanks for looking.

[gene1772]

Greetings all, Due to a lot of down time over the holidays I was able to make some excellent progress and complete the next step in the construction of the Trucks, the Propel Motors. The construction of these was much like the other pieces, challenging for its size if nothing else. Like with other sections I built one complete version first to work out the construction bugs then built the remaining 15. These are divided into 8 right motors and 8 left motors so you have to make sure you keep the two sides straight. Like the gear case there were some small circular pieces that were just to small for me to build with any quality so I punched out a piece of pressed fiber board, colored it gray, and used them as replacements. I believe the addition of the motors make a significant difference in the appearance of the trunk and it really fills them out well. These are the last frame piece to be constructed before the very challenging tracks. Thanks for looking.

[spacerunner]

The Propel motors are very amazing small details and the truck looks already awesome - in the resting lies the power.

[romanmodels]

good work on the moters and gear boxes gene.

[gene1772]

Greetings all, quick update on the crawler. The next step was the main drive sprockets. These were not as simple as they first appeared in the directions but nothing really is on this model. The drive sprocket is actually flat on 12 sides and making that look uniform was proving very difficult. I decided to copy the face plate of the sprocket, reduce it by a few percent, cut it out and put it inside the ring to be used as a former to make a uniform 12 sided ring. This proved to work well. I glued the completed sprockets in place on the crawler and it was finally time to move on to the actual tracks themselves. ( I have been waiting for this part for almost 2 years) I decided to start with the cleats. There are a 38 cleats on each track for a total of 308 cleats on all 8 tracks, it was time to start cutting. Each cleat required a total of 46 individual cuts and 16 separate scores and folds so they took some time. When I was about half way through the cutting I decided to start work on one track so I could see how it was going to look. The first step is to cut out and glue the stringers together. There are 6 individual stringers on each track and there are 8 spacers that go in between, they are a little cumbersome to line up perfectly but with patience…..Next step is to glue the first cleat to the stringer. once I got all 38 cleats on one track it was finally time to test fit it on the truck and see what it would look like. I liked it! It fit better that I expected ( but everthing fits perfectly on this model, great job Mischa!) but I decided not to glue it until I finish all of them then I will see which ones look best and put the 4 best on the outside. That’s it, now back to cutting, Thanks for looking.