Howdy fellow tankers! Finally some progress! After quitting in despair earlier today I change my approach and conquered the beast!

Was having a hard time cutting the 1mm wide strips of copper foil with my paper cutter. Twisted the machine around, cut 1mm marks with my hobby knife and voila!

OK, about this project. My goal was to produce a simple and reliable 350 turret ring that everyone should be able to make that in addition to the 3 wires that usually go up there, two more for options. In this case, the antenna wire and battery on power for the wireless camera that will go into my M26A1 project.

[link=http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXF857&P=7]Evergreen Styrene[/link]

[link=http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&W=001200560&I=LXS031&P=K]Copper Foil[/link]

The Evergreen metal siding is used so that the rods will have a groove to ride in. This will keep them from slipping and crossing circuits when the tank is rolling backwards off that 80 degree hill you thought you could climb! In order to maintain that groove its important to keep the copper foil as thin as possible, in this case it's .005" thick. I've spent a lot of money on the wrong parts or parts that made the project more complicated, even after drawing diagrams and doing lots of research.

Anyhow, The ring is glued with CA to the toothed ring and then holes are drilled through the grooves for the wires to attach to the foil, they are soldered on first then the wire is slipped through the hole and the copper foil is glued with CA in place. The inside where the wire goes through the styrene is sealed with Clear RTV silicone. A 3-pin and 2-pin WS Deans connectors are used.

The copper foil will be cleaned up with the Dremel to remove any excess glue and then I'll put electricity through it again. After that I'll tackle the next other half and post the results.

Cool!! Can be made alot smaller though. In a real tank the electrical connection between turret and hull is called an RBJ---Rotary Base Junction.

http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/rotary/air/
http://www.drdo.org/pub/techfocus/ju...htm#Electrical

Don

Looks great so far swath![sm=thumbs_up.gif]. can't wait to see the copper foil on.

Thanks for the links dsketcher. They will come in handy for tamiya tanks. But, keep in mind the reason that the HL ring need to be a large diameter is because of the airsoft unit.

Swathdiver, are you gonna add a battery or draw power from an existing source in the tank? I wired my camara on the smoker plug that plugs into the board, since smoker is removed. Pluses are the voltage runs those small 8volt camaras fine, camara cuts on and off with remote when tank is shutdown or restarted, and the smoker off- on switch can kill power to shut it off also. But check polarity on the wire lead or the plug, on mine the black wire is positive and the red is negitive.

Rathead123: Power to the camera will be on as soon as you turn the tank on, before it's fired up. Am keeping the smoker. The red wire goes to the negative terminal on the gun motor right? That's because the motor spins backwards.

Amuro: The foil is on, the check out the bottom two photos.

dsketcher: The ring is wide to allow the airsoft unit to function. Remember, this mod is designed so everyone can do it.

It may spin backwards but the smoker plug socket is black positive and red negitive. checked with a digital volt meter that shows polarity. Got in to this earlier while wiring a fan to the smoker plug. Good thing to have found because wiring something like a camara in that socket would have ruined it.

Ok, I mis-understood and thought you were talking about something else.

James, did you ever get a chance to finish this? I'd be interesting in seeing what your "fingered post" (the part that holds the wires that ride along the outside of the ring and connects to the HL wiring) looks like as well as what the turret wiring attached to the Deans plugs looks like.

Also, did you use a thick CA to glue the ring to HL turret ring? Thin CA for the foil or just basic Super Glue? Are there any CAs that won't work with styrene (that what Evergreen uses, right?)?

Lots of questions, but I'd like to give this a try.

Thanks,
Philip

It worked perfectly! Sort of. I hooked all the wires up wrong and it wasn't until after I tore it down and reverted back to a standard setup did I finally understand that 2 of the wires were grounds and 1 positive, and that the grounds were turned on and off by the board to activate the gun and elevation unit. So the unit is complete and works quite well. I was going to install it in my 211 Tiger but the electronics took up too much internal space and I didn't have the room to have the slightly deeper ring hanging down. It will go back into another tank, just no plans at this time. Well, I'm not doing anything with my tanks at the moment or in the near future anyway.

I just used standard Great Planes medium grade CA for everything. The thin stuff runs all over the place and makes a mess. The pics aren't very good but should give you an idea how I did it, the springs were cut way down, eventually a piece of styrene was glued under all the arms and only 2 springs used to provide tension, one spring per line was too much tension.

Thanks for the pics.

Not tracking on a couple of things:

1) Grounding references...not sure why that mattered. As long as each wire going into the turret has a corresponding ring and plug, then it should work without any problem, right? Oh, I pulled open my Bulldog (intended recipient) last night, it looks like there are 6 wires going into the turret: 1 red/black pair (very thin) probably for the MG LED, 2 red and 1 black plus the antenna wire. Looks like I'll need six grooves.

2) You said there wasn't enough space in your Tiger for this ring. Is that because it's your El-Mod Tiger and has the extra electronics in it? Was the battery box in the way? (I thought you took it out of all of your builds.) How wide was the ring?

3) What were the springs for? I don't see them being used in the picture.

Thanks.

It didn't work because I wired everything up wrong! There's a reason why I have 2 - 1gallon zip lock bags of blown up boards!

Yes, the electronics tray I built for the 211 Tiger will not accomodate the ring unless I redesign it. I have plans to ditch the airsoft unit and install an infrared battle system and recoil unit.

The springs kept tension on the ring so the arms wouldn't lose contact, especially when the turret turns toward to the end of the arms. Originally I had springs under each arm and the tension put too much strain on the turret motor so I removed all but 2 and shortened them a little.

Not shown is where I soldered wires and connectors to the arms where they wrapped around the support. I wasn't big on taking pictures back then, and pretty bad a taking them too!

Okay, cool. I think I get the spring thing. You basically had a spring between the wire and flat cardstock that is behind it, right? And the spring can only touch one wire or you short the circuits...

BTW...how wide did your ring end up being? Or how far down below the black turret ring did it extend into the lower hull?

I put a piece of styrene between the spring and arms so nothing would short out. Just used CA glue to keep everything in place.

I think the depth was 5/8" for 6 power lines. Each groove was spaced by .125". The link to Tower Hobbies still works.

GTG...thanks. So, then the friction that you mentioned was from the two bits of stryrene rubbing/pushing against each other - stryrene ring and styrene backing for the arms.

No, the friction was from having too many springs pushing the arms into the grooves, especially when the turret motor turned backwards. Removing all but 2 springs provided enough tension to keep the arms in contact and allowed the turret to move freely.

okay, thanks.