Servoed Hammerhead: Servo and testout

Next, I mounted the servo. I routered away all of the front landing gear box, but after doing so, found out that the servo box was still too tall: the linkage rods would be flexed too far to get to the control +, and that was a problem. Luckilly, mounting the servo on the roof of the model would fit perfectly! The problem was how to mount it up there, it was all curves and wide open.. how to mount the servo in a way that it could still be twisted/removed? Greenstuff. Epoxy putty. I had a bunch, so started making a big block on each side of the servo, pinning it between the two in the floating open space where it needed to be. Before the epoxy completely set, I removed the servo, and let the stuff cure. Then, I cut away the excess, leaving just what was needed


Heres a good closeup of it all: the phillips screw visible on the control + is a handy little attachment I was happy to see I had space to mount: its a sliding set-screw sorta thing, allowing me to slide the rods and adjust on the fly, to make lining them up easier. LEDs were test-fitted, to make sure that there was room for everything planned. The linkage for the chin turret is seen , angled crossways, so the three things will spin the same direction.



Finally, I tried it out. Because I still wasnt absolutely sure the drones would actually spin when the rod went in or out... or just pop straight out. So I wasnt going to stop working on it until I could actually slap all the electronics together and give it a shot. I put burst cannons on all three turrets, to get a better feel for if theyre lined up or not.

Whew!! so it does spin! And looks awesome to boot!!

Servoed Hammerhead: Drone linkage

[grr I cant just cut/paste this whole project... this site doenst allow links to be pasted, or something, so I'm going to have to redo it all.]

I plan on using the curved cradle mount in the wing to hold the drone disk in place, since it covers approx 70% of the drones' circle. So, running on that assumption, I got right to work modifying the drones to accept the pushrods and also to have room for the pushrods motion.

I wanted to keep the mechanism that moves the drones invisible, so, notched out the side of the disks in the area where the rods will be. This was also a good place to have the rods go from the wings' point of view: this slot is right where the meat of the wing is.

Heres a sample layout of the rod, showing how it enters the circles area, and the vertical part (hard to see, sorry) is the hook, that will attach to the drone. At the moment its empty space, but the other piece of the drone will be where the hole actually goes. The hole will be directly to the read in the arc of the circle, and that will be the neutral position, to give the largest arc of movement in each direction.

Here the drone is assembled, and the hole is seen, with the rod sticking out. Some fine shaving and tuning was required to keep the rod pivoting in its hole smoothly, and to sweep through the midst of the drone and slot going smoothly as well. All of this was important; I wanted to avoid any binding of any sort.

This view shows the hole in the wing, and in general shows how everything is set up.

Here the rod is inside the hull, and the position of the holes, and the straight rods, is just about where I wanted it, to give the most room for the servo and its control +.

Servoed Hammerhead: intro/planning

Now, I am finally caught up to my current project, and I'm going to copy/paste dump all the updates so far up to my curent update, and from here on everything will be 'as it happens'.

Well, I feel that feeling coming up again, and AM now going to take the servo-ing several steps further. Here is my initial (often overly optimistic) Mission Statement:

I will build a hammerhead, with a spinning turret remotely controlled. In addition, The chin turret will move left and right (90-120 degree travel), and the GUN DRONE CRADLES will track along with it! Lastly, the third radio channel will act as a 'throttle', and pivot the engine pods up and down. Lighting-wise: the foreward slits in the wings will be lit (white led/incandescent headlights), the cockpit window will be translucent and faintly backlit, the engine pods will have a red glow from the exhausts, and, if possible, the railgun will have blue light strips down the barell length on both sides, illuminating the middle open channel.

WOW. Im not too sure about all that, but anyways, thats the obsession that simply MUST BE MADE MANIFEST.

And heres what ive got so far:

This is the electronics package from the old Razorback. The blue thing is the servo, modified to spin continuously left or right on command (to those familiar with RC servoes, youll know this isnt normal. I had to modify it internally), the white-ish thing is the radio reciever, and the big yellow thing is the battery pack. All in all you can see its pretty small package, easily able to fit fully inside the vehicles, as wires running out of it kind of takes away the suprise/kewlness factor of it all.

This is a rough test fit, showing the arrangement of the equipment in such a way to directly drive the turret- the same way it was used in the Razorback. I can see that there is plenty of room, so this stuff will remain pretty much unchanged (sorry razorback... you can keep the lighting/radar spinner though). That blue servo is pretty small, and I though it was as small as they get...

until I found this:Note the not so subtle pricetag in the background... yeah.. once you get the radio, the rest of the stuff has gotten super cheap over the years.

Here is a size comparison shot, to give you an idea just how tiny it is, and how suitable it will be for this vehicle design.

And now, for the mechanics of how its all supposedly going to work:

I plan on removing the nosegear box, and sinking the box of the servo into the hole, with the cut off landing pad covering the bottom, and hiding it all. The servo will have it arms, and the linkage wires (an example of one top right) will go from that spinning drive arm to the nose (on the left/right side arms), while the drone cradles will attempt to be driven left and right by a pushrod going from the foreward facing drive arm out through each wing, hooked onto the drone disks... somehow (still an initial plan)After some carefull looking and positioning, it looks as though I could drill a tube within the wings, at the rear of the wing, to make the wire reach the drone disks... the problem is the pivoting connection of that rod so that, if it is pushed in and out, the disk will pan left and right. I dunno at the moment: but possibly I could notch the edge of the disk, where it butts against the cradle, allowing the wire to get to the inside of the disk, to attach to the drone. Its complicated, as you can imagine, the angles of all this stuff will change as it moves. And I have to ensure it doesnt just push the drones off of the wing. Plus, I want it to be all unseen.

Well, these are the challenges. There is room. I have the parts. Its just the details of the mechanics of it all... Any suggestions are definitely welcome!!

Tau Jetbike project

oops not quite caught up yet, forgot ALL about one of my 75% completed conversions, a Tau Jetbike-sort of thing. I dont really know why I abandoned it. I think it was because of the negative feedback I was catching from several different forums. "too eldar!" "Too big for a bike!" "a railgun?!? are you kidding me?!?", and also, because I never figured out how to represent engines (and a "looks more like a weapons platform" feedback to drive that problem home)

buut anyways, it was a kewl looking contraption, regardless. It was all inspired by this concept art, of a vehicle thing that wound up never existing as a product. Its looks were so awesome that if I COULD make one, then of course I SHOULD. Heres the pic or the concept art:

cool, huh? now who wouldnt want to make a model of something like that?!? Its a fixed sideview, so I had to guess and interpret on some of the details. Does it have wings? That is recognizeably a drone in a cradle of some sort right in front of the riders knee. But the question is: is it centermounted, with a narrow assembly over it? Or is it a drone closer to us than the rest of the bike, like on a wing that we really cant see? I went for a wing.

I had wanted to do this model for a long time, but there were some problems, and one of the most daunting was the rider himself: out of all the tau warrior arm parts, there were none that looked like a guy riding a bike, with hands out just so... Then the Piranha model kit came out, and thats what started things going, as it had arms that were perfect for this. So, over the time of this project, the concept drifted pretty far off of the artwork, and pretty much became a thing of its own. and here we go!


Since I was going to cannibalize from a prianha kit for the arms anyway, the whole thing was up for grabs now, since it wasnt complete anymore. So the wings would obviously be the piranha wings, which were pretty small to begin with. so they were butted together, and filed away to make room for the big gun.
And here we go. The wings were just about perfect, with only a few cutouts here and there for the railgun part, shown. I fitted the gun so that the muzzle was was partially midway. Originally, the wings were going to point the other way, with the rider sitting in the narrow section, but after holding the gun up to the wings, I could tell right away that was how it was gonna be.






I bought an eldar Viper jetbike, after doing some research in the parts catalog, and seeing things that I could use. Mainly, the seats and hull. Here we see the other seat (vyper is a 2 man bike), and normally it oriented like this. The other seat was the same, and where the drivers legs would hang there were two foot pedals. Perfect, eh? Well, sorta, Eldar like their flutey curves, and I had to juggle and cut things around a bit to get what I wanted.




I flipped the chair around, as seen in the original seat, so that the lower back area was where the riders crotch goes now. the rest was cut off so the rider could lay belly down on it, and super luckily: the footpedals were a perfect match for one of the firewarrior leg parts.. almost like it was meant to be!

As we see, the fit is pretty much perfect. He looks like hes goin 400 mph in a rice burning crotch rocket motorcycle, doesnt he?

The seat frame crams right into the nitch at the rear of the wing, handilly getting rid of that little oddity. I love it when things fall together like this, and I wont have to go and fill in gaps all over the place

Next came the hull. After several attempts and various options looked into, this is where the design really split from the original art. So here we have the original Vyper hull, which was far too tall and broad to fit comfortably on the wings, and in fact looked rather silly. Looking carefully at the lines, I decided to cut it as shown.

And ended up with this. It looks much MUCH better now, doesnt it? Plus, I was rather proud of myself in ending up with a form that fit the wings PERFECTLY as well. The hull was now so log that it would hit the gun , so the hood was notched to make room. This made everything look more integrated as well- not just slapped together, so, bonus!

Here is the wing-hull fit. Pretty slick, huh? Also notice I salvaged the dashboard from the piranha kit, and after quite a bit of sanding and fitting, got it to look like a part of the bike. The riders hands can presumably be on some controls, and everything looks to be in order so far, right?

Heres the same 'placed together' mockup shown above, but from the shot that matters: the concept art angle. Technically, I really should put the drone antennae on the underside somehow, but those are stock shield drones. See how the wing is just as un-apparent in this view as well, and how my interpretation of the drone arrangement is justified?

And heres a side by side comparison. While not exactly a match, I believe the spirit is still there, and clearly evident.

And, unfortunately, Things stopped there. Honestly, I simply cant think of how/what to do next. Suggestions are definately encouraged!

Servoed Razorback

On my next project, I wanted to make another tank look completely normal. Until the turret moves under remote control!! Its those sort of "ooh! OOH!!" neat-o moments that inspire me to do all this stuff. Like I said before, I had some RC airplane parts that I wanted to incorporate into this model tinkering.






Here is the complete set of RC electronics I am going to use in the model. The blur thing is the Servo, the little white gear on top it made to spin continuously left or right. perfect for the turret. The grey-white thing with the prongs is actually the entire radio reciever! 3 channels, even! And the yellow/green thing is obviously the battery. Except for the battery, these things are tiny. How tiny? well, lets compare it to a QUARTER.

Thats tiny. I'm sure I could find a way to fit these inside a model tank, no?? The blue servo was an extra part, and the reciever is one I went and bought just for this... dont be alarmed! Guess how much it cost; $20.00! This stuff has gotten seriously cheaper over the years (I remember a reciever was over $80), yet the radio transmitter is still pretty pricey. Now, as some may know, servos for these things dont normally spin continuously... they only move about 45 degrees in each direction. After doing some research online (yay google!) I found out how to modify them to do what I wanted.

Heres a closeup (same image from the one before.. yay 4.1 megapixels!). now, if you look carefully, on the right youll see a metal can: thats the motor itself. The top half is the gearing, the bottom left is the potentiometer that controls everything.... the thing in the middle- under the bottom left line of the X. is something that doesnt belong there: a resistor. Its not too difficult of a modification: you open it up, disconnect the 3 wires of the potentiometer from the mini circuitboard, find 2 closely matched ohm value resistors (I used 1k.. matched means you get a meter and find 2 that are close.. resistors are never perfect: +/- 10% or 5% of its value is what it actualy is so you have to test them).. and hook those resistors to the potentiometers' connection points in a V shape. pretty much as simple as that.

So, with the parts all ready, the mounting of it all was pretty simple and Zen... I just jammed the drive gear into the botom of the turret disk, and glued styrene bars on either side of the servo to keep it from spinning. Simple as that: the gear-turret connection was the only attachment. I did it this way after several experiments, and found that the servo had to be 'rockable' and loose in order to keep the turrets motion smooth. It needed to be sloppy, and bolting anything down would only result in things binding up and simply not working. The reicever was mounted directly to the side of the servo box with sevotape, meaning that the entire thing was a tight little bundle with only battery wires coming off of it... all tucked up nice and neat under the roof plate. So, just make room for the battery, keep the area under the roof plate clear, and that part of the job is DONE already!

Next comes the lighting and the radar spinner. So, some details: the quarter sized thing wrapped in tape is a 3v watch battery, which tucks into the sidewall gap out of the way. The red block is a disconnect plug so I could remove the top from the bottom wires. Lets see... on the roof section to the left you can see the leds, both white and red, which will also be tucked into the sidewalls. The white rectangle plastic thing on the roof is the radar spinner, story and closeup on that later. Inside the open side door cavity (by the battery) is a slider on/off switch connected to this little side circuit.. I needed an on/off switch that could be easilly accessed without tearing the whole thing apart... what kind of model would that be?!? Lastly, there is a wavy-square hole cut into the right side wall of the interior. This was to make room for the battery to fit in crossways... this was pretty much the only place to fit it, as it turned out to be larger than first figured (the problem with dealing with things so small, so small in fact that the entire tank can fit in the palm of my hand, remember). You will see the battery in place in further pics as well, so lets move on.

OK, here is a bit that I am a little proud of and creeped out by: The radar spinner. One day One of my neighbors was throwing away a broken CD-ROM drive, and I offered to take it so I could tear it apart (some fevered dream of putting its laser to use.. no way). As I tore it apart out of simple tinker curiosity... I found the mechanism that powered the tray in and out of the drive... it was a teeeny little motor with a built-in wormgear, and a track on the tray. In between was a normal gear that meshed them both together... Interesting. I know from building PCs that they ran on both 5v and 3v DC, and that that teeny little motor was one of the two. Eagerly ripping it out, and connecting it to a 3v battery, it spun! eureka! 3v motor it is! PERFECT! This was all in a mad energetic frenzy that took place in about 10 minutes' time. And thats where I got the creepy from... I was a mad professor- that guy from robot chicken... or a seriously tweaked out individual. WHEW! anyways, it was a simple matter to glue the gear onto the radar base, then test fit and glue the wormgear motor in just the right angle... an axle was required, because this sort of setup does NOT need slop (the radar would often get flung off, and rattle all over the place). Add it to the wiring for the lights, and done! Most of the effort after this was cleaning up the wiring and making it all fit together seamlessly.
Thats the advantage of this particular model... once you glue the gears and side panes in, you really dont have to glue anymore, and let it just fit together like some chinese puzzle.
This shows the final arrangement of everything. All that is needed is to plug the batery in, and put the roof on. all the work making it seamless really pays of, and it just sorta clicks in place! You can see the battery installed, and the servo electronics all tucked up under the roof plate, the watch battery tucked out of sight. Just flip the roof over and..A tank! packed full of electric (not sure if its electronic) gizmos and goodies, yet none the wiser. I can play this in a game on the tabletop. then at one point, take out my Futaba radio, and suddenly:

*Sigh*.. that makes it all worth it!!
Here we have a frontal view, showing the headlights that were painstakingly hollowed out, and yes the LEDs are direclty behind them.... but unfortunately, I am unable to power this side circuit up... its battery is dead. In time I'll have it running and have another video edited in here.
Thats it for this old project. Sad to say, that this model was also abandoned and left to collect dust as soon as it was finished.. shame on me!! And now... yep now I can say Im caught up in the history speech, and can now get to what I'm currently working on: The new servoed Hammerhead!

Kroot pistol project.

I was away for work when I did this, out of boredom. I had some spare Kroot bits, and just wanted to make a convincing kroot pistol. After looking through all the assorted bits, here is how it went: I planned on a left handed aimed pistol shot, cannibalizing parts from these ones showed on left









These are the cuts. At top I wanted the pistol grip from the actual pistol. At middle I wanted the left hand, thats holding the rifle stock in juust the right way (kind of hard to see, sry). At bottom, I wanted the stock of the rifle, with the cocking handleand all included. Yeah, believe it or not, these parts all fit together nicely.








First, I had to empty that left hand. At the moment, its holding the rifle barrel in a normal firing pose.. but if I empty it out and flip it over, oddly enough its also a left handed pistol grip pose. Do it yourself: hold out your left hand like your supporting a rifle... your thumb is at 9 oclock and your fingers wrap around counterclockwise. most likely your index finger is a little foreward of the rest. now, spin your wrist keeping that grip intul your thumb is at 3 oclock, and imagine instead a pistol there. Weird, huh?



It was a little risky, digging out chunks of plastic this tiny, but a new and ver very sharp exacto knife helps. Eventually I got it emptied out. You can see how it looks like its aiming a pistol already, yea?













With a little shaving and fitting, I eventually got the grip on the grip just right. Thank gawd for the pro-weld style of plastic glue; where it melts the plastic parts together. That helped fill in some gaps. I just gouped it up, and squeezed them together.. presto!! 1 solid piece of plastic.












Now for the amazing bit: this is how the two parts are going to go together, to form a pistol. Whats amazing is how the weld glue makes this rough looking join asolutely perfect.. with very little effort. I just did a rough fit test, then slobbered the goup over the stock-bit, waited for it to get nice and squishy, then pushed it into place, letting the melted plastic bead and buldge out (hence the weld analogy), waited for it to dry and harden up, then filed/scraped the extra weld beads away... and presto!



The end result! Solid as a rock, because it is now indeed on solid piece of plastic.
(point of note: use the expensive weld-on glues... you do get what you pay for!)

Maybe its just me, but I find that amazing.

Adding the barrel to the gun was as simple as cutting one off of one of the rifles, then chopping it off at the appropriate length. Now, for the size comparison: My little baby is the middle one, and the other two are 'bits' showing a piston in its holster (to hang from the belt) You can see its pretty true to the spirit of the 'official' pistols, if a little too big and blocky. I say "so WHAT?!? its still freakin awesome!"

Fitting the arm was simple. There is an arm pose where the kroot is holding the rifle out in front of him like a Bat'leth (your a geek for knowing the ref.), making his left arm naturally in the right pose. So, a spin of the wrist, eyeball what looks about right, and presto! All done!

Next was to find a good pose for the rest of the kroot, and came up with a very "sheriff in town" cowboy sort of pose that I really liked. tell me what you think:

I think it looks just about perfect. But sadly, This poor piece of crafting artwork has remain unchanged, un painted, and in a storage bin ever since completing it.

Shame on me!

Well, this is still a historical review. This all happened when I was away for work in Virginia... and while there (making an insane amount of $$$, thank you per diem!), I got into RC airplanes. Heavilly. They became cheaper than I ever expected over the years, and before I knew it, I had extras and spare parts for this hobby as well... when it hit me; why not combine the two?

Next will be the Servoed Razorback!

Lit-up Hammerhead

OK, first comes the truly clumsy and ugly.. so bear with these beginner steps; things do get better as time goes by.

This was a project that was simple enough: light up the tanks, keeping the batteries inside. So it would be lit up, yet still floating up on its flying base: no wires. That was the initial appeal. There was plenty of room for batteries, and you can see what I mean by the bonus of the simplicty of these GW vehicles: looking in through the back door, you can see its all open space.

I'm actually a little embarrassed by the uglyness of this wiring... hehe. But, there is a on/off switch (in the foreground) And the main splicepoint was an F-4 phantom style Donkey-dong sort of splice: all the wires are twisted together, then soldered into one connected glob. There are two wires moving to the top left, that dont go anywhere anymore. They used to go to a blue LED in the turret gun, but the bulb blew out or otherwise died over the years, so I disconnected it. The wires I used, BTW are transformer coil wires... teeny tiny, solid conductors, insulated with lamination. For this small stuff, I like this kind the best: they hold a shape, they are stripped by simply razorblade scraping it, and best to 'sneak' though parts of the model, and can simply be superglued in place.

Heres the Hammerhead in all its illuminated glory, all that remains: two headlights and a backlit cockpit window. (nice looking tank by the way, isnt it?? -for those of you unfamiliar with GW or 40k)
Back to the workings of the thing: This shows the battery pack, and the somewhat innerlit details of the interior. The power wires were left long so that the battery could be pulled out of the hull so I could replace the batteries.
Here it is all packed up. Plenty of room!

And here is the power switch in its hidden location. WOW the bottom of this model is ugly!! I never actually did finish painting the poor thang.. too much playing at the time.

Well, that sums up my first Project. I learned a lot of things, and got better with the tools of this 'trade'.