Challenger 1

[Estnische]

I love your work with the aluminium angle. Makes you feel like Colin Chapman making composite Lotus chassis.

[tomhugill]

I love your work with the aluminium angle. Makes you feel like Colin Chapman making composite Lotus chassis.

Thank you! In this case it feels like increase complexity and add weight

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[tomhugill]

A joyous day on the challenger, a package from china with some bits for the chally 1 amongst other things.

I've got the gearboxes and 3 of my 12 road wheels (the other 9 comming from james).

Making the chally ready for the resin pour, trying to learn lessons from the last one, lots ofasking tape over areas of potential leakage. Unfortunately this time the resin found new and annoying places to leak from. Namely 3 of the suspension stations through the suspension mount.

Luckily with periodic movement they didn't seize up.

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[tomhugill]

More joy, today I got my parts for the chally from James (well most of them as I can't count), new sprockets andore road wheels!

This means I can finally get the tracks from on and have her outwardly looking ready to move.



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[BarryC]

Looks awesome Tom, can't wait to see it in paint!

Barry

[tomhugill]

A little more progression the chally 1. First step was milling out the engine vents so I can fit some fine mesh. I didn't fancy drilling each individual hole!

Next the head lights needed to function. Using a round head milling bit I hollowed out the headlights and cut down the lens on he LEDs. Wires were then run through into the lower hull.

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[tomhugill]

Next up is the electrical installation in the turret. Like on my TES chally this is getting a G2 board which means it needs a slip ring for true 360 turning as well as all the electrics in the turret.

The challenger 1 turret is less roomy than the chally 2 which limits the battery to a 3s 2.2a lipo but that should give plenty of run time. I've had to keep the wiring as neat as possible due to the limited space two main conduits,one for the motor and speaker cable, the other for the lights, turret rotation, deck limit switch etc. I've left a couple of blank wire pairs in the turret for the IR emitter and the coax machine gun led. In the hull I've added deans connectors for the motor plugs.

Like the chally 2 TES I'm using a Clark rotation unit which has a 6 second roation on 2s and 4 second on 3s. Great little unit with a deck level function built in.

Lastly I've added 8mm rare earth magnets in place of screws to allow quick access to the turret internals. This gives plenty of grip without making it difficult to remove when needed.



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[HERMAN BIX]

I love it, absolutely love it

[tomhugill]

The chally unfortunately suffered a setback shortly after my last post, the tk80 wasn't playing ball with the drive, there was some weird mixing not amount of resetting and playing with the settings could fix. Clark was very good and replaced the board but it was a away a while and has been sitting on a shelf waiting for it's turn to have some work done.

Thankfully the new board did the trick a d it's now working nicely. I still need to dial in the gyro setting as it's on default but it's still pretty good.



To get it ready for the next club meet I finally got roud to installing a battle system and th coaxial machine gun



I used Clark tbu base in the commanders cupola. A little grinding and it's a perfect fit.

Little video with the tk80

phpBB [video]

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[HERMAN BIX]

Bloody hell its like "Robo Cop" posessed a tank