Moon Bug part 2

I have been progressing on with the glass house cabin.
It has been fiddly to get the side mullions straight as they have to be curved to fit the curved bowl and end up looking straight.
The method to achieve this is to place some masking tape on the curved surface and then draw a line outlining the shape you want. When you peel of the tape and place it on some flat sheet you will hopefully have all the curvature in the right place so that it becomes straight again once cut out and glued back onto the curved surface.
The 2mm thick styrene has to be massaged into the required curve by hand first before cementing into position.
The other thing is to try and not get any cement onto the clear glass areas and fog them up. If any small bits of solvent do mar the clear areas you can usually polish it out with a plastic polishing compound.

 
All the power supply wiring has been installed and tested. I have a ubec providing 12 volts from the 14.4 volts delivered from two 7.2 volt Lipo batteries in series which power the vehicle.  12 volts is being provided to the cabin lighting and the two 10mm led tail lights which each have the required resistor to work with 12 volts. The head lights are two cheap LED torches which are supposed to run on 4.5 volts from three 1.5 volt dry cells. I found a small cheap DC to DC converter board which has an adjustable output voltage so I am down converting the 12 volt supply and providing 4 volts to run the headlights. I found the torches started to draw a lot more current at 4.5 volts so I dropped it to 4 volts which was about half the current and more or less the same brightness. Getting the torches to work took some fiddling about until I found the DC to DC down converter board and I burnt out a couple of torches in my attempts. Luckily they only cost a couple of dollars.

The is a tiny board stuck to the top of the UBEC in the picture below is a Pololu rc switch with small low side mosfet. It takes a signal from the third channel on the transmitter and switches the lighting on and off remotely. I believe you can find a similar thing on HobbyKing.com already wired up.

 

10mm Led tail Lights

Converter board providing 4 volts to the headlights.

 

I am using twin old school brushed motors in this vehicle which are more than capable of pushing this heavy beast around at a decent if not frightening speed given that this is a heavy custom made one off body shell. The electronic speed controller is a Hobbywing Quicrun WP 880 for dual brushed motors. This setup is also I might add considerably cheaper than a brushless system.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...