Dragline Crawler Build

[Rvjimd]

For a few weeks now I have been learning how to run my new bench sized mill and lathe and loving it! I have always wanted to scratch build a dozer and my first big project is building a crawler undercarriage for my NyLint dragline conversion. My conversion was completed last fall but I never got the truck powered. Thanks go out to Jared and Steve for all the good info in Jared's thread of his BE 22 build.

Here are a few pictures of my crane and the track pads so far. I have gone through at least four variations of pad designs to get one I hope will work well and still look "sort of" scale. Paramount in my project is to have it look good enough but also not make production of parts to complicated.



I believe the scale is 1:16 on the crane and I tried to eyeball the pads against crane and adjust the drawing Steve posted to get some reference for other parts. The second pad from the left is most similar to my final design choice. I will be using 1/8" x 3/4 x 1.5" aluminum bar stock. I messed with some thicker material but it was a pain to machine the detail of the drive dog ears on the top of the pads and I found a way to use 1/8" and still have the drive dogs.



This is a stack of the pads that I am NOT going to make. The "third dimension" of the drive dog ears on top of the pads really added a lot of extra steps and problems to the machining operation, like issues of holding the part and just extra machining steps.


This is the drill guide I made to locate and drill the holes in the pads.


I need to adjust the drill guide to perfectly center the holes on the pads and then I'm ready to start making a bunch of these things!

Jim