Let The Build Begin!

[Trucker47]

Well I am finally getting around to building my first piece of construction equipment, and even better; it is my shop class project for the year! I started designing it early May 2011 and after a few versions, screw ups, long nights and errors I have finally got the design finished! I roughly based it off a CAT 930H to get the general shape right:



I did change some aspects of the design for RC convenience and if push comes to shove there will be no copy write infringement. But it is roughly 12:5 scale +/- 10mm. Each wheel will be independently driven by a planetary gearhead motor and all motors will be driven by a Sabertooth 12RC ESC rated at 25A Peak. The hydraulic system will be powered by a RC4WD 4200XL Pump, I will be making the cylinders and Bi-directional Spool valves and the hose will be from a place in Germany. It will be approx. 60cm long with the boom parallel to the ground , 20cm wide and weigh in at about 23-25lbs. For most of the construction I will be using 6061 Plate aluminium, Standard Carbon Steel, 7075 Aluminium for the boom, and a little bit of styrene here and there. The model will have approximately 350 parts, welded, brazed and bolted together/ I luckily will have full access to a Tormach PCNC 1100 that our school just bought and luckily I am the only one who currently knows how to run it so my teacher has basically given me full access as long as i don't ruin the new machine. I hope to have the model some what perfect but with it being my first construction model i'll try to keep my hopes a little lower. I think I've got most things figured out but I'm sure I am going to learn lots. One question I have is how big of hydraulic fluid reservoir should I have? Anyways here's a few renders of my design:



Version 2:



I liked it but it was WAY to wide (30cm!!!) and to short (50cm) to be scale.

Version 3:







Bi-directional Spool Valve - Servo Operated:



-Chris