Phew, it has been a while! A shameful 17 (!) months. But if there is no blogpost, it does not mean there is no progress! On the contrary, there's been quite some work behind the scenes!
First things first: similar to what I did with the Constructor, the Hailfire Droid has been redesigned from scratch. That is right: I have entirely disassembled the original assembly and improved upon certain issues that was glaring to myself.
Just before we move on, I want to inform you all that the following "Work In Progress blogposts" for my MK Projects will be using the "[Lego] Work In Progress: Something (Date)" template from now on. However, I will not change any of the previous blogposts and that is to prevent some possible issues with hyperlinking.
One of the first major issues that the original design suffered from was how the wheels were connected to the head. Every wheel assembly was connected individually, which gave the Hailfire quite some unwanted flex when driving. The connection between the wheels and the head is now done through one rigid V-shaped spine which improves the stability while driving but also improves the durability of this model a lot!
The wheel assemblies have been redesigned on a few points, mostly ones you cannot really see from the outside. The original frames had a few structural issues because I lacked a number of parts, which was before I was working with Bricklink - now that I have the right pieces I need in the right quantities, that issue has been resolved. This also brought the opportunity to work on some gear-related parts where some gears had a tiny bit of backlash (which is now resolved) and I have also been able to use some of those new and fancy redesigns of gears which immediately had some positive effect on the driving "feel". Being more clever with space, it also allowed me to add more counterweights - right now, the Hailfire Droid weighs almost two kilograms.
And last but definitely not least, perhaps the most aesthetic change of the entire Hailfire Droid project is the face. In the previous version of the Hailfire Droid, the face was built from a lot of hinges connected to other hinges and such, which caused it to be a nightmare for my OCD because touching the face would result in either having sub assemblies to fall off or the entire face to move. There was no frame behind the face; this was definitely something that needed to change.
The entire head section has been redesigned in order to accommodate this change. In the previous version, the frame was built around the battery box, receivers and the sub assembly that gives the bottom cannon its forward movement. This caused the frame to have a few structural weaknesses, mostly around the center. As of now, instead of having a frame around certain sub assemblies, there is one frame that is also directly connected to the V-shaped spine, and components can be connected to this main frame directly.
The face is actually pretty dense in parts, because there is a lot of Technic-to-System assemblies hidden underneath all those brown wedges, plates and slopes. It might not look like it, but you can almost lift the entire Hailfire Droid from those brown cheeks! And even if the main opening around the main eye looks fragile, it is not the case at all - the frame assembly where this "eyebrow" is mounted on is connected to the main spine and to the same assembly as the cheeks (which means the "eyebrow" assembly won't go anywhere).
Well, in addition to all of that, there's even more - probably a bit too much to get really into detail without making this blogpost a bit too lengthy. All in all, pretty good improvements. Did you know that there was even a redesign in between this version and the previous one? Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of that point of development - the time between the in-between and the current version was rather short, hence the lack of any images.
Here, have a GIF - it's the least I can do.
Anyway, that's it for this overview - I'll see you guys again next post!
No comments:
Post a Comment