Blackadder's Landkreuzer P500; Der Wühlmaus

[Blackadder]

Yankee Ingenuity:

Yessir thanks to Henry Ford and his assembly line idea I'm moving great guns on fabricating these treads.

I have all the skulls made and partially sanded down to the right thickness and I have a good start on the skull tread. I've got enough segments for 26 skull treads which is a lot more than I need but there are always a few crips so its better to make spares plus I can always hang the surplus on the turret for spares.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/D8F547E.jpg[/url]


I made 16 skulls last night which should suffice for the time being no point in wasting greenstuff although each skull requires about a BB sized bit of greenstuff.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/NpkxLnW.jpg[/url]


You can see I have to trim down the skull thickness as it protrudes too high above the tread.

I thought the skull segments would be the hard ones to reproduce but it appears the generic treads are/will be the labor intense ones.

[Blackadder]

One Down 79 To Go:

Well the first track link is completed. Start to finish I'm guessing it took a half hour to build from scratch including glue drying time. Once I get jigs built and get an assembly line going I'm sure I can finish the next 79 in about eight man hours but of course I don't have that time to devote consecutively so over the course of a few days give or take should see them assembled.

The first image shows the back of the link; strangely I only took the one and no close up.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/b0xUsuC.jpg[/url]


This next image shows all the skull treads ready for the final assembly and a segment of a Baneblade track for a size comparison.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/xFU3uLk.jpg[/url]


The image below shows a closeup of the thickness of the link. The standard Baneblade link is 4,25 MM and my link is just about 6,0 MM.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/20C9ghv.jpg[/url]


A close up of the tread detail, each tread has 27 individual pieces of plastic including the skull. It's a very labor intense construct.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/rQi5MiQ.jpg[/url]


And finally the bogie wheel compared to a Baneblade bogie.........

[url]http://i.imgur.com/2m8BKsq.jpg[/url]


God what a monster this tank will be.

[Blackadder]

68 To Go:

Well the ones I deemed the hardest to do because of the sculpting and number of pieces are ostensibly complete in their basic assembly. There are some that think I should have cast the prototype and be done with it but my way proved best albeit much more labor intense because although the components remained more or less locked in stone size-wise subtle shifting of the components position-wise was and still is necessary for the best artistic appeal.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/bIB8Dux.jpg[/url]


Case in point, originally I cast two different sized skulls and eventually went with the smaller which was about 1,5 MM shorter in breadth.

Here you see the skulls glued in place and on the individual frets they look adequate and I was satisfied but seeing them all together as shown here they are wrong; especially when paired up with the generic tread links, lower right in the above photo, where it will be subsequently revealed that the skulls need to be re-positioned.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/GdB8tMM.jpg[/url]


And so it turns out lunacy does have it's purpose.

[Blackadder]

Tread Factory:

After a few failed attempts at making a decent mould/casting I decided to go back to my original plan of making treads by hand. there is just too many problems with casting at least in the way I am geared up to do it. Were I into the manufacture of these for profit I would engage a qualified mould maker but since it is a one shot deal I decided to tough it out.

Below is my tread assembly line in various stages of production so you can see the progression.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/aRx4q2Q.jpg[/url]


And I couldn't decide which image I liked best so here it is again......

[url]http://i.imgur.com/5dXu9eI.jpg[/url]

[Blackadder]

Hitting My Stride;

Well the first ones were tedious because I didn't know where I was going with these.

After I finished the skull treads I knew what the basic tread thickness and the overall size would be and I did have the prototype for the generic tread pretty much nailed.

Yesterday I played around with speeding up the production process and it was kind of a down day production wise but this morning I hit my stride and accomplished quite a bit in the hour I devoted to production.

I glued the strips together the six long strips to the right. That represents the amount of track necessary to do each strip being cut into 11 segments 3,0 CM long 66 in all; probably a few more than I need.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/kes7Wb7.jpg[/url]


The five generic to the left are completed track faces and still need the back side of the track installed and the 3 center rows are pretty much what I accomplished in the hour this morning..... easy peasy :P

[url]http://i.imgur.com/8AWq65s.jpg[/url]


I hope to be half done today with the track faces.

Then I can start on the blanks for the bottom run of the tracks.

[Kirsten]

you are completely mad...

[Dave Mcturk]

you are completely mad...

lol. but youre having fun.

always amazes me when ppl model things that wont be seen ! [i mean its a model for a game not an engineering project]

the tracks underneath only need feature on the bit that extrudes from under the hull for example.

but perfectionist is as perfectionist does

[Blackadder]

Great minds think along similar tracks (groan) I can to that realization just this morning; I can mould the bottom run out of a single piece of plastic with just the inner surface of the run segmented. Thanks for the suggestion.

Oh and BTW no one will even see these even in a game. They'll just sit on my curio shelf.

My son's friends don't have armies that can compete with these point values.

Ha!

'course they could gang up on him..............

[Blackadder]

And You Guys Thought I Was Crazy:

Well I figured out a way that I do not have to make 80 individual treads, I probably don't need any more than the 44 presented here.

Of course I have to make the bottom run but that can be all one piece except for the inner track segments which is really quite simple

[url]http://i.imgur.com/pbJ9a0g.jpg[/url]


So now I can go back to twiddling my thumbs and toes Ha, Ha!

[Blackadder]

How It's Done:

Or how I do it anyway; I'm sure there's a better way but I don't know of it.

I'm about ten minutes away from finishing up what I hope is sufficient number of tread links so it's a good time to take a break and show my production line; this time for installing rivets:

First you have to cut the rough cut rivets and for that I use the half inch Xacto chisel (Center right on the board) and I cut about twenty at a time from the 1/16th inch diameter rod center board just below the cement bottle.

I have two tread links just below that; the upper one is a completed link that I use as a guide to maintain the correct spacing and the one below that is the uncompleted work piece with one rivet already installed.

[url]http://i.imgur.com/lseMphu.jpg[/url]


The pieces to the right are the tracks that are yet to have rivets installed; only eight left.....

and to the left twenty four links I just completed this hour.

In the close up image below i'm trying to demonstrate how I pick up the rivets because no one can pick up the individual rivets by hand and install them with their fingers without going bats**t crazy or with tweezers either for that matter.

No , what I do is just touch lightly the individual rivets with the sharp point of my NEW #11 Xacto blade and brush a drop of glue onto the area of the tread link where I want the rivet to be and lightly press the rivet on the Xacto point into the glue drop and hold slight pressure for a few seconds....

[url]http://i.imgur.com/7vjYGDd.jpg[/url]


Withdraw the knife and the rivet stays glued to the tread..........

Do that operation 128 times and you're done.

Easy, Right?