1/25 6 Axle Lattice Crane

[Southgate]

This is my reason for joining this forum, this 1/24 crane. I wish I knew about you guys when I started on this, probably could have saved me a lot of trouble. BUT, Despite my prior lack of RC experience, the crane is fully operational as far as I want it to be. Still this is very much a WIP, a lot of work yet to do on almost every feature of the crane.

With a 3 channel RC setup, the carrier drives at a nice slow speed, and all 6 front wheels steer.There is a motor-gearhead in each of the rear hubs rather than using differentials. The separate motors-setup has no problem with differentiating, it can do tight turns without pushing or dragging any of the drivers. The 3rd channel operates a separate feature I'll go into later if anyone's interested.

The upper unit is fully RC functional too; slewing,(rotation) boom lift and drum are controlled by a 4 channel airplane radio. Slewing requires 2 channels: on for direction, one for speed. I tried to use a reversable ESC but this little motor wouldn't have it, so I devised another way to control it.

You just can't get a close up overall picture of a crane!




Here are some features. I'l try to cut the blah-blah and let the pix do the talking mostly.

The boom, live mast and gantry all lay down realistically for transportation mode, and they pull up and lay down hands-off, except to guide the pendants out of their own way when laying it down. Even a real crane requires hands on for this.




In fact the model is "self erecting", it does all the lifting of any components needed for operation. again hands on are required only where this is needed on the real machines.

I'm not going to make a habit of driving it in the dirt, but I wanted to see the front and rear wheel equalization working...


You can see that in the extreme here.


Made of aluminum, steel and brass, she tips the scales at about 29 lbs. The cosmetic bodywork will be plastics, mostly.

3 steer axles:




Pretty early on I was forced to the conclusion that building a crane would require a lathe and mill. I managed the funds (sold a truck) and got a Sherline 4400 lathe and a model 2000 vertical mill.




Now I can make some parts!

There are lots of other picturs, I'd be glad to share, but I need to go run an errand, so I'll be back. Thanks for looking Dan.