I've never actually worked out the engineering of how a bulldozer's hydraulic arm works. I knew they are yellow and have hydraulic pistons on them, but until I set out to scratch build one, I had never actually paid attention to how the pistons move the arm and how the system is engineered. Physics, pfft, I don't need no physics.
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| I want it to function like the arm on this bad boy. |
I love this about scratch building. If you want it to look realistic, you need to do some research and work out how a real machine would work in the real world.
And I now have a little stop-motion video in my head of how a hydraulic arm works. A little like this, although in my head it doesn't have quite such a mid-90s Microsoft clip art aesthetic...
Although these don't look like much now, they will soon be two hydraulic arms which will mount one of the two aerial rudders I recently built.
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| Scratch building starting off with sheet styrene. |
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| Shaping to make two pieces of the arm. |
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| Two arms, two pieces in each. |
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| Weld seams added with stretched sprue. |
I've also been adding weld seams to the metal arm, and will have a "How To" video out this weekend I hope.
Cheers,
Dave
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