The tracks are proving to be more of an issue than I’d anticipated. I’ve seen a lot of K’nex crawlers in the past with a variety of tracks, and all seemed to work fine. Now that I’m trying to do the Panther tracks, I’m running into issues. Ideally, I’d like to have the track three wheels wide plus two indexing spacers, so that it looks like the real track as much as possible.
You can see that the basic layout seems simple, but there’s a slight problem. The wheels I am using slide easily between connectors in a 3-connector-wide groove. But a blue rod only supports 6 total connectors edge-on. I made a track with 2 connectors in the center, but this would only support a single wheel on either side of the guide. I don’t think this would be stable, and also isn’t keeping with my desire to keep it close to the real function. It does work though, so if none of the other options are doable I might just keep it as a placeholder.
This means if I want a 3-connector wide center wheel, I have a few choices:
- Have the wheels hang off the edge of the track. This is not acceptable for a number of reasons.
- Have the track links staggered along the length of the track. This would probably work, and might make the sprocket connection a little easier (more on that later). It’s also closest to scale.
- Use yellow rods. This makes everything easier, in that it holds exactly 11 connectors, which means 3×3 wheel slots with 2 guides in between. This makes the track huge, and means I either need to be OK with going off scale, redo the scale of the hull and turret, or switch gears to make this a Tiger.
A few pics of the designs I’m playing with are below.
I also need to sort out the sprocket drive. If I can, I’d really prefer to have the sprocket be an actual gearing system that engages the outer track pins. This is how the real one works, and would be nice if I can do it. Problem is, taking an 8-way connector and putting green rods in all slots won’t fit any of these designs. Same if I use white rods and use wheels to adjust the engagement height. This is going to need a lot more thought and design to get right.