The Snakehead (RC)

 

The inspiration for this model came from astyanax's Fast Robust Inverted Wheel. I really like it, but it's not obvious what to do with it, and it took me a long time until I finally got an idea.
My first idea was to turn it into 'Road Runner', the wheels being the spinning running legs like in the cartoon. But designing the character is beyond my capabilities.

This model here is what I thought up next. 

The V8 & propellers are driven. A huge sequence of gears is needed to combine the output of both motors and drive that through the tail at an angle: 17 in total to reach one propeller. The head has suspension, so to speak - it rests on a shock absorber.
The construction is sturdy and all gears are secured.

I've used astyanax's design as a base for the wheels, although I heavily redesigned it in order to:
  • use non-inverted tracks; a ring of 40 inverted tread links has huge tension in it, and I'm not comfortable with the stress on parts it creates.
  • make use of large turnables instead of small ones which lead to gear skipping: the orignal 20:28 geardown can't cope with the increase of wheel size & model weight.
Some notes, should you decide to build it:
  • the inventory includes a Lego battery box, but The instructions are made for a MouldKing one. I wouldn't recommend using a Lego one because they're too heavy, but if you really want to, I've included an appendix showing what to change; you'd have to figure out the cabling though. Adapting to a Buwizz or Cada one should be simple.
  • you might be tempted to leave out the cable clip parts because you don't have any; but they are there to ensure the cables do not mingle with the wheels. If you omit them, you'll have to take that into consideration.
  • one of the '2x2 round tile with hole' part is functionally required and should not be left out or replaced with a half-bush.
  • it's difficult to control :)

The instructions were hard to make: tracks, cables, and lots of angles. Like for the Ripsaw, it actually took much longer for the instructions than for the design.


Download parts-list (Bricklink-XML)

Comments

Post a Comment