~1:12 Miller Century M100 Rotator wrecker

[dremu]

I've always been fascinated by the tow trucks for big rigs. The biggest of the big is the Century M100 rotator crane truck. For instance, a coupla 1:1's:







These things are built to order, personalized bespoke items, and start at about a million and a half USD. When you're channeling your inner Tonka-truck-aged child, these things are pure cool.

So I spent a coupla years on and off trying to model one, started at the bottom. Those stupid outrigger legs were the death of me for the longest time. Even with a coupla segments telescoped, I could not get the legs to come out past the body long enough; they were way too stubby.

Eventually after looking at every photo Miller has posted and I believe all of their videos, I discovered the outriggers aren't independent left-to-right, which I'd assumed, but one block, with the left outrigger offset longitudinally from the right, so each can have the whole width of the truck. With that epiphany I was able to model nice long legs. (No ZZ Top jokes, please.)

Also found some relatively small, powerful, and inexpensive linear actuators suitable for use with Arduinos. Well, I say Arduinos, they're actually ESP32's, as the TX has been, ahem, slightly modified, and just uses WiFi to the motor controllers on the truck. Of which there are three for maybe 22 such actuators (I may have lost count), seven winches, three lightbars and in general more LED's than you can shake a stick at.

The CAD looks something like this



And the end result