Ok it's time to try this one.
I think I know enough to be dangerous so here I go...
I have a couple of these I've been picking up over the last few years and this one was the worst of the bunch so I picked it to be my prototype...
There was no way I was going to be able to clean it up enough to paint without a sandblaster and even then I'm not sure how it would look... SO I'm going with "patina" on this one...
First thing I did was get it stripped down
To make it manageable I divided it into three or so pieces, the carrier, the crane house and the boom and buckets. I'll probably do a dragline bucket and attempt a clam bucket....
But first the carrier....
I'm going to use WPL axle assemblies and a 3d printed dual motor mount.
But first I need to cut away these two stiffing rails because they are about 6 or so mm to close together
I went with this stye because to me they looked beefier than the regular WPL axles
I did a sort of walking beam type suspension vs leaf springs because I figure this is going to weigh around 20lbs and figured the springs would just bottom out. I don't think I'll need a lot of flex since this isn't a rock crawler
This is the basic layout, I cut some aluminum angle to fit around the different ribbing and joints in the carrier frame. The rear walking beam sits just outside the toys frame stiffeners so I bolted it all up to my new frame rails and set it in place. The motor mount is the same width as the WPL running gear so it all lined up...
The problem came with the front axle it mount on top of the frame rail unlike the rear that mounts between it.
So I cut it down to the size I use for my Tonka trucks and turned the angle over and bolted it thru the existing metal in the front there is enough room to bolt thru the frame
The motors are 500rpm feeding thru the WPL axles which are 2 to 1 ratio that gives me about 250 rpm at the wheels
I haven't decided which wheels I'll use so I just stuck some on it so I could see how it sits.
I need to figure out how I'm going to wire this thing up, but I'll work on that this week...