Finally, I can say now that the engineering and the resulting drawings are finished.
It was difficult to come to a common accepted solution, everyone has his ideas and wishes. But time goes on, money is there and the project manager, after listening to everyone involved, finally took the steering levers and headed in the direction he thought is the right one. Right now contacts with firms, able to help us, are laid and this should result in the start of the making of the strong framework in the next months. Before summer this should be finished so that Robert Vandaele and Vandaele Machinery of Oostrozebeke can make a moving framework from it, using the already available motor and hydraulic system from the former setup.
This should hopefully result in a moving framework in the beginning of September. We are aiming for a trench-crossing capable machine that is reliable and can also ride on the normal roads (so with permanent rubber pads on the track-plates). For this track-plates with the right curved corners Robert already proved to be able to make a decent solution.
An initial trial was welding half tubes to a plate and then manually cutting and deforming the tops. This version was shown in Cambrai for the 95th anniversary of Cambrai day last autumn.
A subsequent trial starts from plates alreayd in their length bended into the right profile.
Further manually working this results gets already nearer to what is should be. But this is certainly not yet the last step, although approaching. The best solution would be using a dye to stamp the form, but this woulc cut to much in our budget.
The image below is from the hand of Dirk Vinck, already involved in the very first yellow framework,doing the drawings. This is how the strong framework will look like. The rolls, sprocket and idler are also already placed. I hope to be able to show you the same in a couple of months on photo's and if you are around in real life. Once again, thanks for all who have made this possible so far.
