A piece ‘a Me

Well I had a fun week last week, I built some meaty bash plates for the axles. I know, they’ll catch on stuff all over but they look as mean as hell IMHO
It was a bit of a trial an error job. I pretty much got the plates worked out right the first time, but the 3-screw mounting to the back of the axle was giving me that ‘please don’t put that kind strain on me’ puppy-eyes look, so I had to add a brace at the top.
Dad (bless him, I’d have never gotten anywhere with all this metal working without his tuition!) had the idea of bracing the plate again the top link mount, so impact stress was directed into the triangle of the top links and spread out between the top links, the mount and the chassis. It was a solution, and a good one, so i went with it. The first version used 10mm wide 1/16th plate strips with a bend at each end to screw against the bash plate and the top mount. This seemed to work well when I built it but…
While testing the truck for the first time with the plates on, it took a nose dive off a log and landed on it’s face. The bash plate worked great, nothing but the tyres and the plate hit the ground. The only problem was the bracing strip snapped clean off. after a bit of muttering expletives, I went back to the drawing board. I came up with the idea of using tie-rods anchored to the battery plate at the front and a small lump of 1/8th plate at the back. These weren’t 100% straightforward to do, however as I had to drill the tie-rod holes at a slope through the plates on the axles to get the angle to the bash plate right. I used M3 all-thread and 4mm allu tubing to make the rods and place a nyloc at each end and would em up. They seem to be a lot tougher and have stood up to me carrying the truck about by them. The combination of the rod and the sleeve tightened up against each other makes a very strong tension/compression system that makes them very stiff and resilient.

All-in-all they look nice and work well. I dunno how much use they will be for crawling though, as they could well get hung up easily. Oh well they make for nice eye candy at the very least