Tuesday, November 30, 2010

I forgot to title my previous post... Silly me

Well, as you can see from the lack of pics, I didn't get to test my snowmobile outside yet...
Instead, I made more modifications.

FIRSTLY: Originally, the treads were powered by a six tooth sprocket, which rotates at 80 rpm (powered by a 400 rpm motor) and that translates to 480 tread pieces a minute speed, and since each tread piece is about 12mm long, that translates to...
5760 mm a minute...
...
96mm/s
...
0.096m/s
...
...
...
0.345km/h...
It was so SLOW!!!

SECONDLY: The six tooth sprocket was quite low down, almost in line with two other sprockets on the tread (well, actually it was at about 160°), and so could slip if under enough pressure

THIRDLY: The sheer torque of the treads were well powerful enough (save for the slippage mentioned earlier) to overcome any obstacle it may encounter, unless it could not grip the surface (very unlikely in the snow)

Taking into account all of these things, I changed the shape of the tread slightly to changed the overall vehicle's performance.

First, I switched the 6 tooth sprocket for the only other available sprocket size, a 10 tooth, meaning it goes nearly twice the speed.

(Ok, ok, it still only goes at 0.575km/h, but still, better than before.)

Second, I changed the distance the front sprocket was away from the chassis (There's a diagram to explain it coming up in a second), bringing it much closer, and therefore reducing the the angle at the driving gear down to about 110°, giving the sprocket much more surface area on the tread, and so stopping the annoying slipping that had been occurring.

And finally, the third thing sort of doesn't matter, that the torque reduced, but it doesn't really matter as it still has well enough torque to overcome most obstacles (unless, as I said before, the grip fails).

I think it's about time for that diagram.


This may be a bit hard to understand, so let me explain it.

Firstly, the vehicle would be pointing to the Right

Secondly, the green shows how it used to be, with the smaller sprocket and further out front sprocket, and the red and orange being the current set up.
As you can see, the smaller green sprocket used to be it's driver, but it had to little grip on the tread, and so was replaced with the orange larger sprocket.

Thirdly, I must make a note that this is not accurate
It is only a diagram

However, if I can, I will be testing it tomorrow, and will take pics.


Ps. Just a heads up, my next big project is most likely to be a large model of the all terrain vehicle from the Halo™ series of games for the Xbox™ (which rocks), the Warthog, and may take a long time to build (aka. a month or two), which gives me a great opportunity to blag about it, day to day updates and all that.

Disputatio tibi posterius.

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