cool project … great engineering/fabrication work it was very cool to go through thanks for sharing … might want to installed a winch before going off-road in case you get carried away but sure with the spans of the tracks it will be unstable.
/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
Yes, I have thought about adding a winch that would be mounted onto a 2" sq. tube so it could be inserted into a receiver welded to the front and rear bumpers. I plan to use the winch to provide the lifting of Snowzerblower.
/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
I've been playing with the cad system and working a bit on my Snowzerblower design which I plan to build over the summer. I plan to use a small compressed air system to pressurize the cylinder which actuates the v-belt take-up pulley. Electric clutches are a bit pricey in this size range.
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/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
I am wondering if the rear end will lift up ? with the weight of the motor and the blower and the leverage of the extended arm up front it will be pretty heavy...
BTW I am really impress with your software skills
/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
I guestimate Snowzer weighs 1700 lbs with a lot of that weight situated towards the rear end due to the Toyota engine back there. That whole assembly calcs to about 275#. I doubt it will have much of an effect. Thanks for the cad kudos. Need something prototyped?
/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
I've been looking around at some tracked type snow vehicles and debating about building one myself (unfortuantely it will be when I finish up grad school and have more time.) But, just skimmed through most of it and what a great build thread! I appreciate the documentation! I'll have to keep this in mind when I get through grad school and to the point of building or buying one.
Nice work!
/ My Senior design project - a "Swamp Thing" tracked vehicle clone
Well - I did a couple things this week to Snowzer. I bought and installed a 2500 lb winch (not completely wired yet) and I attempted to weigh Snowzer. I plan to use the winch on both the front and rear of Snowzer so I had to fabricate a 2" receiver for the front bumper and a frame to support the winch. Here's a photo of the installed winch.
Since I do not have a trailer to haul Snowzer down to the local scale, I had to try something different. My plan was to run Snowzer up onto my maintenance ramps (used to let me crawl underneath Snowzer) and then use a small ram from my porta-power set to lift each corner and measure the pressure in the ram. You can see the setup in the next photo. I measured the ram and found it to be about 2.2 sq. in. in area. I then calculated the ram load from the pressure I read. The total for Snowzer was 4200 lbs. WOW! It was way off my estimate. I should have used a lot more carbon fiber when I built it.
