Ah, the good ol' Hummer. I had a blast modeling that thing back in the day, when I knew jack squat about 3d modeling. Good times!
I used a program called Zmodeler to model it. A great program for beginners! It doesn't have that massive maze of buttons, options, and windows upon windows of settings that some of the professional programs like 3dStudioMax and Maya have. It's not as powerful as the big guns, but like I said, it's great for beginners.
Now, back to the build. Update time!
I've made a good deal of progress on getting the upper half (tug) and the lower half (guide wheels) connected together in a manner that is much more stable and sturdy than the previous method. Of course, now that I think about it, I pretty much rushed the previous method and threw it together, because, at the time, the whole actuator idea was still in its proof of concept stage. That stage ended quickly when the thing spat the track out at me as I mentioned in my first post
For those that are curious, here is how I had it set up before:
Pretty much a bolt on either side, fixed to the top half, screwed into nuts attached to the bottom half (no pun intended), and tightened to make both halves "hug" the track. It worked, but it was ugly, and it wasn't really a sturdy way of keeping the two halves attached. Both halves tended to go askew from one another ever so slightly.
Here's what I have now. It isn't finished yet. I don't have the tightening mechanism in place, but that will be the next thing I work on.
As you can see, this new version consists of a larger hollow tube placed on the four corners of the tug unit. Four more smaller tubes are placed in the same relative spots on the guide wheels unit. The smaller tubes slide into the larger tubes, giving the whole unit four points of support.
The tightening mechanism will consist of two more large hollow tubes attached to the guide wheels unit. These will be tapped/threaded and a screw will come down through a hole in the top of the tug unit. The screws go into the threaded tube, and will let me tighten/loosen/fine-tune how hard the whole unit "hugs" the track.
More on box progress...
I've ditched the floor, front, and rear walls that were shown in my first post. They just weren't square enough and straight enough to make a box that was as perfectly shaped as I could get it. I must have been having a bad day when I cut those, because they were poo.
So I remade them
They are of much better quality this time around.
I did a mock construction of the box to show you
Everything came together perfectly with no gaps, and no signs of crooked edges and unsquare corners.
The last pic shows how much space I have to work with inside this thing. Good thing I drew this up in Photoshop first and designed the actuator to use every inch of track that was there