F4WD

Four wheel drive vehicles have always excited my imagination, and this time I joined two Farrusco (Dagu's) chassis in front to front as you can see in the picture below:

This way both chassis are fixed on each other (is this correct to say in english??) and I thought it would be cool to have them articulated in some way, so I started to design a ball link and this is the first output (oh, did I mention I have a 3D printer at the office? :D

It still need a bit of work because the link needs some kind of lock to prevent the vehicle to bend itself and touch the ground (gosh!! what a crappy english!!)

I used OpenSCAD to design the piece, it is a great tool to use because everything is made with simple commands and you can design pretty much everything!! You can download the OpenSCAD files in Thingiverse.

In the next chapter, the redesign!

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6 - MAY - 2011
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List of things to try:

- Try to implement springs, speccially on the Z axis

- This possibilities were given by MaskedRetriever on Thingiverse:

  - Zero z-freedom answer: Change the geometry from sphere to cylinder. That eliminates the ability to rotate entirely.  

  - More sophisticated answer: cut away part of the sphere on the ball top and bottom, then fill in /slightly less/ of the socket top and bottom. This will yield a maximum angle of "vertical" rotation. 

  - Even more elegant answer: just have the sphere wrap around more of the ball joint. The closer it goes to fully locking, the less rotation you get. To have more rotation in one dimension than the other, just make the hole elliptical.