RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Its starting to take shape now, excuse the pun, and look like a beast of a tank.

Nice to see the earlier stepped nose varient! It looks fantastic, managing to capture all those cast shapes is hugely impressive!

Thanks guys, the angles were a real pain made a lot worse by the blueprints not showing the area clearly due to the turret. It will look a whole lot better when it gets it's milliput cast texture coating, but that will have to wait until I've done some detail work around the driver hatch area.

Alwyn

Time to get going with the milliput!



and as I had some spare thought I would have a bash at the steel cut marks on the back


Lots more to do
Alwyn

Alwyn superb work as always The rough and crude castings and welds on these Russian tanks has really grown on me. I know you have much to do but along the way it's really coming into shape

Enjoying your progress

Carl

It's almost a shame to cover that expert-level styrene fabrication with putty, Alwyn! I'm highly impressed with how you managed to capture the shape.

The casting and weld marks looks spot on! Love it Alwyn

Thanks Guys, next I have to mount the turret on the body, so it's down to some serious CAD work on a turret bearing.

Alwyn

Thanks Mick, I've covered this in threads about the bearing issue, the use of small vertically mounted bearings only covers the lateral thrust, whereas with my heavy turret I need a bearing that handles the vertical weight load as well as the lateral thrust.
viewtopic.php?f=195&t=23707&start=20
The 3d printed design to resolve this will be revealed shortly. Of course whether I can make it work is a separate issue......

Thanks for the interest.

Alwyn

First attempt at the bearing - the tolerances and exact sizing aren't correct but you can see how it's planned to work
The various components including upper and lower races, ball cage, and bearing balls:

Ball in ball cage and lower race

and you can just see the ball in the closed up bearing

I need to reprint the components as various thing weren't quite right on the first print but the design looks workable, it will just need lots of cleanup, especially the ball cage which due to the thinness of the part didn't print the ball holes accurately.

But it's a start.

Alwyn