One Track Mine Co. - Part two

I routed three copies of the little One Track Mining Co. vehicle chassis. I'll make three different models as per the original sketches. The pieces were routed from some scraps of 1.5" 30 lb Precision Board. Since I uses a tapered 1/8" bit the track shoes routed just as I imagined, slightly thinner at the edges. I had routed the pieces with a 80% overlap which provided a smooth surface. I left a thin onion skin layer against the spoil board so the small pieces stayed put on the vacuum spoil board on the router.

Here's the same there pieces pulled apart. I simply blew the dust off the pieces with an air hose before I glued them up using a five minute epoxy and five clamps.

Once the epoxy set up I used the air powered die grinder to even out the edges. The corners and back of the hood were rounded to match the radiator cover. I'll cut and glue a little more material to the base to widen it before I start the sculpture process. 

Before I started the sculpt I did up a new rendering of the wheelbarrow vehicle based on the little scale model as the engine housing/hood wasn't in my first renders. I'll do my sculpt with this new drawing as a reference. The hardest part of this build is that it will have to wait two weeks before I do it as I head out of town bright and early tomorrow morning. :) Stay tuned...

One track mine concepts...

Last month I did a step by step of building a little display tank. It was a fun little project!  Now i looks like we may just get to build a series of tracked features which use some of those ideas.

A client has asked us to come up with some ideas for a mining theme adventure golf. Our first concept was pretty conventional, being a narrow gauge mining railroad car. We just built one a few weeks ago so the concept came pretty quick.  But as I finished the concept we knew we could get a whole lot more creative. After some discussion we came up with a ring machine, protruding from the ground. Golfers would golf into the broken chute from an upper level. The ball would go down chute and then around he corkscrew of the boring machine before dropping onto the golfing green.

Once we got going in a creative (and somewhat silly) direction the ideas came much faster. The mining car became a power wheelbarrow, with a single tractor tread. The brand name of he manufacturer was dubbed 'ONE TRACK MINE Co.' - just for fun. 

The crawler wheelbarrow immediately spawned more ideas with the mono-track, each more creative and ridiculous than the last. First up was a small mining bulldozer.

The last machine in this series was the drilling machine.

The ideas are so much fun I may just decide to do up some study models. If so I'll post step by steps here. At the very least here will be plenty of CNC plasma cut files to make. Stay tuned...