A Tulsa Public Schools Art Teacher and her son's halloween costume that requires functional treads

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Hello!

I have a brainstorming question, and I’m not sure this is the correct community to ask it. But, I figured, from one nerd to another, it wouldn’t hurt…

My son has requested that I make the character Ty from the Netflix series Dinotrux for him for halloween this year…

Last year I built him a push-powered, workable-moving-parts car out of an old diaper box, using dowel rods through narrow PVC for axels, attached to small pool floaties sprayed with textured/rubberizing spray paint for the tires/wheels. (Attached to salvaged tin plates for hub-caps duct-taped to inverted, toy traffic cones for the wheels attached to the dowel rods via duct tape…)

The highlight of the costume last year was that the wheels (although we all cheerfully overlooked how out of alignment the wheels where…) was that the wheels actually “worked” - I had adjusted the height so that they actually moved and propelled the vehicle with the pace of his walking - made trick-or-treating way easier than having him carry around a giant cardboard box costume…

ANYWAYS! So, this year is TY, as I said, but TY has… treads, like most construction vehicles… My search for treads bigger than toy-train sized treads but smaller than actual construction vehicle treads led me to this website… where, I honestly have no idea what I’m looking at or how to measure the exact size of what I need. Any brainstorming/engineering ideas of how I could get actual, functional treads onto this costume? I am not NEARLY brilliant enough to program this as an actual robot (I’m too old to have actually had robotics when I was in school, but I am a HUGE FAN and think it’s made cool!), I just want something that can feasibly be attached to an otherwise cardboard structure that will actually move with him as he moves around in the costume… also… steering??? He will be 4… He handled the car last year pretty well just by picking it up when he needed to make a sharp turn… i guess he could do the same with this??

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

A Tulsa Public Schools Art Teacher and her son’s halloween costume…

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@purpldonkybeater Welcome to the RobotShop Community. It’s great that you’re looking to create some nice costumes for your son. If you consider that most toy manufacturers keep the treads aesthetic and add wheels underneath any sign of the complexity of creating functional treads, you might want to consider this approach (far easier and still very aesthetic).

Functional treads in the order of around three feet long from front to back require something to keep them centered on the sprockets. Since you talked about using cardboard last year, my assumption is the budget is not $500 for real rubber tracks.

Take a look at what others have done for costumes of Wall-E which uses tracks. Ex:


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