Wow, looks amazing dude! The 'dirt' really did the trick. :D:up:
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Wow, looks amazing dude! The 'dirt' really did the trick. :D:up:
LOL where the lollipop sticks & straws go :D.
Looks awesome mate, congrats :up: +rep :yellow_green:.
awesome!! +rep
this is freaking awesome!
That looks awesome man! The attention to detail, the tedious as hell work, the creative use of misc items... Win, all the way. +rep
Thanks guys! It means a lot to me - while I think it looks good and I've surprised myself, it's nice to know it's not the beer goggles that (sometimes :) ) are my ego making it look good LOL. Hopefully in a couple days I'll have it finished - it was raining today and I'm going to Disneyland tomorrow I think, so maybe on New Year's Eve...probably one tick before midnight it'll be totally done. We'll see.
Well, at least I can say I finished the crawler itself before 2010 ended. Maybe I should retitle this thread “How to Build Your Very Own Sandcrawler in LESS THAN 4 Years!”.
Unfortunately, in my zeal to cut out a chunk of that PVC pipe, I used my soldering gun (the hot knife blade initially pictured just wasn’t…er…cutting it if you’ll pardon the pun). While the chunk of plastic, mostly melted, came out eventually, and the remaining bits from the viewable angle looks decent, my computer room now smells strongly of melted ABS. ugh. Hopefully the smell will fade in a day or two.
The pipe prior to the exercise in mutilation.
The initial mutilating equipment: old X-Acto knife to be heated with the candle.
After the knife failed (it was working but probably would have taken the whole afternoon), I pulled out my 2,000 degree soldering gun. This pic was after I started melting the pipe with it.
Unfortunately it’s hard to see in this pic the amount of smoke coming out of this thing. It definitely looked to be on fire.
The melted chunk after removal. It took a good half hour to get this thing out of there.
The rest of the pipe:
And with the top of the case on the computer again:
Incidentally, I examined the conveyor belt, and it doesn’t appear that anything is blocking it. But for some reason I can’t figure out, the motor won’t turn on, and before I did all my detailing it worked just fine, switch included. It could be a problem with the power switch, I just don’t know. I’ll probably revisit it eventually.
And, I got started on the base! It’s a sheet of ¼” pine plywood, cut to fit on the tabletop where my sandcrawler sits. I had to cut out notches in the corners since the legs of the table stick up slightly. I also made an extension piece to go on the front, so the loading door isn’t just hanging off the edge when open. However, since there’s a cross-piece on the table between the two legs that also sticks up slightly over the top, I’m not sure yet how I’ll attach the extension piece…
This is what the front extension piece is supposed to fix, if I can figure out how to mount it onto the rest and still fit correctly on the table.
I ran out of daylight today to work more on the base, so I’ll finish it up this weekend. But the official build dates on the crawler are April 27, 2007 to December 31, 2010.
:) Awesome work bud :up: & all the best for 2011 :yellow_green::banana::yellow_green:.Quote:
Originally Posted by artoodeeto
Nice work. ...now you just need to build a custom table for it.. :whistler:
Thanks!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Waynio
Thanks! Yeah, custom table will happen when I have the room...probably will be years though. *sigh....Quote:
Originally Posted by x88x
LAST SANDCRAWLER UPDATE! It is officially done; nothing else that *needs* to be added to complete it. I may still add things like sculpted jawas at some point, but not right away. The base is done, although I’m not 100% happy with how it came out. It sorta looks like sand, but I lack the space for a larger base that would have room to add the surrounding stuff I’d wanted. There are some things like tracks behind the treads, slightly mounded sand in front of the treads, etc., that I *could* do on this base that might improve it, but I’ll need to get more “Scenic Cement” glue as I went through a whole bottle making this base today. I just don’t know if it’s really worth it to make those additions on this base, since someday I hope to have the space for a much larger one that can be much more detailed. I certainly have plenty of powdered walnut shells left, I maybe used a pound from the 10lb bag today.
So, on to the last 10 pics. I didn’t do any more detail shots of the model since it hasn’t changed from a few days ago when I posted all the detail photos.
The pine plywood sheet, 10 pound bag of powdered walnut shells, spoon, glue, etc.
After spraying the sheet with glue and coating it with the powdered shells.
I then gave it a final, VERY generous coating of glue that finished off the bottle, but mostly ensured that the shells won’t come off the board.
And lastly, the crawler on its base. The blue light coming out the front isn’t nearly as bright in real life as it appears in the photo.
