Yesturday I was looking at two wheel loaders I picked up from walmart a while back for a cheap price.
I wasn’t too impressed with its range of movements. As you can see below… that’s all the further it goes [zzz]
I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if they acctually worked!? I just couldn’t resist, I broke out the hobby knife and drill and went frankenstien on one of them. After a few hours of work I had this. I had to cut the bucket off of the arm since it was molded as one piece. I drilled and added 1/16" brass tube for the moveable joints.
But wait! There’s more! Not only does it have a realistic range of motion, its made to be connected to two slow motion motors to control the motions of the bucket and arm. There are two music wires connected and wired thru the lower part of the cab and out of the bottom of the body just in front of the rear axle so the tires will hide them from view.
It’s too hard to pose the loader while taking pictures, so you can’t really see the full range of motion.
Nice work, I’m interested on how your going to make them move as well. I take it the motor will be under the layout and the piano wire will be on a spool or something making it go up and down depending on the direction of the motor? Or something like that, lol.
Really nice work! [8D][tup] Maybe you should use some plastic sleeving on the wires where they go through the chassis to minimize friction. What are you using for servo motors?
So is the next step making the wee little folk climb into cabs and start tiny diesel engines spewing smoke? Seriously though, very nice touch. Would like to see a video clip of the loader working though it’s ROM on your layout. [C):-)] [tup] Rob
You got it. I will run the two wires down thru the layout to the motor(s) underneath. I haven’t decided if it will be one slow turning motor with a specailly shaped cam or two controling the two movements, or two slow turning motors and some special circuits to control the movements.
I tried using some more of the 1/16" brass tube tonight to run from below the layout up and curve inside the chasis to where the wires come out of the lower front of the cab. The tubing was too tight inside when bent, so I will have to pick up the next size bigger and try that. I was also toying with the idea of mounting the previously mentioned motor(s) on a small platform connected directly to the two brass tubes and attaching some linkage the motor to move the whole unit back and forth as the arm raises and lowers. Then it will look like it’s driving forward as he’s preparing to dump the bucket.
This will probably be a long process to finish just based on the fact that I have about 10 projects I’m working on at the same time. (For some reason I decided I needed another[banghead]) But anyways I will post a vid when I get it in motion. There isn’t exactly a place for it on the layout, muchless anything else on the layout, but I have a few ideas.
