Us halftrack spare tracks
 

I have one of those Torro US halftracks that I've been working on for a while. I bought it used with the quad .50 cal machine guns removed and I upgraded the electronics and removed the battery box from the underside to give it more ground clearance. I've wanted spare tracks for it for a while, but all my searching came up with nothing. I felt like the tracks were a weak point that could fail and then the model would be useless. Spare tracks seemed like a good thing to have...

I 3d printed tires for my next IR moving target 6x6 truck and for a M3A1 scout car I'm building using TPU and when I was done I had a mostly full spool left over. Thinking about what I could do with all this left over TPU I thought about those spare halftrack tracks. It took a few prototypes to fine tune the size, but I managed to design and 3d print spare tracks for my halftrack. I put a more aggressive tread on my tracks than the stock Torro tracks. Now I'm saving my stock Torro tracks in a bag out of the sun and running my 3d printed tracks with no worries about cutting them on a sharp rock or wearing them out. Now I can make more tracks anytime I want.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...a311464b4c.jpg
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I'll take two. :p

I'll fire up the printer...

If the mail charges would not bankrupt me I would get in line for a spare pair.

TPU printing is one of the reasons I'm keeping my old printer around. The Bambu Labs printer doesn't like TPU much. Are you going to share or sell the STL to print them? If so, I'd be interested also. :)

Derek

That is great! Someday, I must get a 3d printer, though I have been thinking of a resin printer for finer detail. Could a resin printer make something flexible like those?

The short answer is, yes, you can get flexible resin for resin printers.

I will take two pair

Ok, we are not supposed to sell stuff in these threads, so PM me if you want some of these.

I had a chance to take the halftrack outside for some testing. I ran through two batteries (about 40 min.) in snow, mud, and on ice without any problems. It never lost a track, it never needed any help at all. I even did burnouts on the ice (a frozen pond) with no issues. I climbed a small dirt hill, I ran through snow, I wadded a puddle, no problems.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...711c331800.jpg
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Looks cool! I'm scratch building a 1/9th scale halftrack using crawler parts. Is the rear suspension on the Torro halftrack sprung? I haven't figured that part out for mine yet.

Wow, that sounds like a cool project.

The Torro halftrack rear boggies are not sprung. They do rock on the shaft between the two sets of road wheels, so it can adapt to terrain somewhat, but no springs. You can see it in action here. This is using the stock Torro tracks.

This movie features the new 3d printed tracks...

Rich, I sent you a PM...

jarndice, I sent you a PM...

Got mine, very cool. Good price, too, 20 bucks plus 10 bucks shipping with the small flat rate box. Shaun, if you get a few guys together over there I bet Greg could get 5 or 6 pairs in an international small flat rate box, which is about $40 (a bit over 33 quid).

If you have a Torro M16 these are cheap insurance against future headaches. As far as I know this is the ONLY way to get replacement tracks, Torro doesn't sell them. Here's a little "box opening" video ...


:cool:

Very cool Gary! Glad you like them. I'm printing up a set for someone else and I'll post a picture of them on the print plate with all the support material. It's quite a mess to clean up.

On a side note... Martin was designing a halftrack, but had not yet worked out the track part of the design. I designed this track. We invited each other into those projects, and it's looking like my halftrack track design will work on his halftrack design. Two guys, on two different continents, working on scale designs independently, and the parts seem like they will fit together. What a crazy cool thing!

I also designed a track that uses the CCKW doolies to make the CCKW into a halftrack. It isn't historically accurate, (perhaps as a local Alaskan design post WW2??) but I made a working set for fun.

And YES, I spray painted my tracks with Rust-oleum Camo Flat Black.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...d137331958.jpg
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I mailed some off to the UK today...

Here is what they look like with all the support material still on, and then stripped off.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...7128460264.jpg
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I took the halftrack up to Tankland this weekend and ran it in the snow. It did great, although I did get it stuck twice, and it finally threw a track when the sprockets iced up.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...8c124c63af.jpg
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Awesome

looking good, yes this project sharing can work out quite well when you get good team members working together :)

Paco, can you get bottle rockets in colorado? I'm thinking a calliope would look awesome on that half track.

I WISH!!! Nope, bottle rockets are not legal in Colorado. That's why I like your Nebelwerfer project so much. I cant build and fire one, but somebody should, it just looks too cool, so I'm glad you are building one.

A Calliope would be cool. I don't know if they mounted the Calliope on a halftrack, but it would be a fun paper panzer to build. I keep thinking of mounting a 75 mm in it, so it can be a 75 mm motor gun carriage M3, America's first tank destroyer, but for now it can just be an ammo hauler.

I can see the Major using it to bring in some girls to visit the Dirty Dozen.:p

lol! That would give the troops something good to fight for... or fight over!