A piece ‘a Me

Had some good clean fun with the new Wheely King tonight. I unwound after work by taking it on an initial shakedown test around the garden at home. We’re lucky enough to have a vast garden, driveway and mown paddock right by the house, so I had plenty of room to stretch it’s legs.

It glides real easy over rough bumpy ground, is perfectly at home on grass or gravel, and can climb over some really lumpy obstacles, even with no diff locks. I even managed to fight my way through a patch of grass that was taller than it was, without stopping! It takes the knocks and has a pretty goo lick of speed for something that’s primarily for off-road bashing out of the box.

As far as the rock crawler project goes, I’ve identified these important problems so far:

It grounds out in the middle on pointy obstacles. This could be cured with locked diffs, I feel, and maybe reducing the ground clearance in the middle to make is see-saw more over the pointy bits.

It stops when it lifts a wheel at both ends. Obvious really as it has unlocked diffs.

It leans to on side. I\m pretty sure this is caused by the mega soft suspension. I removed the collars from the springs, and the rear stabiliser bar from the lower links. This gives it insane axle articulation but also means the constant side ways torque from the mid-mounted motor tips it to the right. This won’t be an issue once it’s slowed for crawling hopefully.

It scared also the cat senseless
Picture alert!