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Hi Richard, hope your keeping well.. Robot Wars eh... It's been a long time since I last watched it... Is it still going? The last time I heard anything about Craig Charles he was/is doing a Funk and Soul music show on BBC 6 Music! Not that I have anything against a bit of Funk you understand It would be cool to catch up with you again Richard, no rush whenever is good for you Now for a fun video The stripdown should of taken a day at the most, but when everything is being video'd using my Camera Panning Jig Thingy, one day gets stretched to five! With the frame stripped down I could make a start on the final welding.. Well, almost The last couple of bit's of "made out of a cheap office desk" Quadzilla frame were bugging me.. The only problem was important bits such as front suspension lower mounts and front diff mounts are made out of one big plate that's welded to the Quadzilla frame.. And it's kinda important to make sure these mounts stay in the same place. So after a lot of bracing including something to hold the said plate in the right place, the lower front got the chop! Would you look at the rust in that! At some point during the build the bit of tube that these two bit's of desk are attached to was welded in not quite where it should of been.. In other words it looked pished but wasn't noticable until everything had been stripped from the frame! Cleaning the suspension plate of the left over bit's of rusty desk took a while, here's the plate bolted back on where it should be.. A bit of space to fill to connect everything back up again.. A lot of new thick wall tube has gone back in the front, but I forgot to take any photo's yesterday..

Next job is a rusty drive pulley, I've managed to find another but the centre needs changing.

While I was at Kingsfold last weekend this turned up. Its a 37 inch Wheelhorse snowblower, it's had all the rusty bits welded up and looks all there even comes with new bearings, seals, cable pulleys and chain.

Raised platform in place, just waiting for the wood to finish it off... One or two machines have crept in as well...

I managed to get an hour on the pulley before a member of the family wanted a bed moved, . First time I've used the Myford so quite pleased with what I've done. I put a 3/4 shaft through the old pulley to align it in the chuck and machined the hub off. I'm going to do the same with the new pulley to get the hub off then bolt and weld together. Comments welcome as I'm a bit of a muppet on the lathe and need education,

Your doing a great job there Chris, from a pile of rusty parts to someting far more red and shiny I snowblower has always been on my want list, but if the past 6 odd winters are anything to go by, I'm not sure Hawkhurst would get enough snow to need one!

Just kidding, the Mowett was pretty stout for a low cost machine. Sometimes we forget that economy machines were available to the consumer even when the best machinery in the world was being made as well, however most of these economy made products disappeared rather quickly, deemed not worthy of saving. Now we see that there is an interest and a worth in them and there are very few around.

Probably is !!

I did think of having four wheels on rocking beams but decided against it for now. I had bought four wheels extra cheap from eBay. The seller bumped the price up soon after, probably realizing his listing mistake. I made and tried the four wheel arrangement which could be easily changed over via quick release R clips. Could even have three wheels, two one side and one the other. The rocking beam parts before assembly and on the trailer. The steering column was made to hinge down for more compact storage but didn't save much space so just left in the upright position. The bracing strut can be fitted as shown, or in a horizontal position which I thought might make the assembly more rigid. Extra bolt holes were drilled in the face of the seat box. Again left as it is as no difference either way. Some of the column and steering parts. I tried a chain and sprocket first, parts from a lawn mower which were heavy and had too much free movement. Later changed to push / pull rods. The top sprocket which had a D shaped hole was pressed onto it's 1/2" shaft after filing the shaft to fit. Was going to be welded but it hasn't moved yet. The yoke is a mixture of box section and tube shown before welding by the Showman, along with the following parts. Thanks Chris. The bottom sprocket, a 3/8" drive socket, bolt and tube, were all welded together forming the pivot and drive between the trailer and tractor. A piece of shim was inserted to take up the gap around the socket.

Didn't get much time today but here's the latest.

Fitted the new bearings and cleaned out the axle tube, greased the axle shaft and put some oil in the tube just enough to coat the bear metal bits for protection then assembled it. The auger runs nice on new bearings.

Reminds me of a skeletal version of a House Robot from the Wars......Dead Metal-ish . Regret not being able to pay a visit yet Ian. Hopefully in the near future.

Beautiful sunny day down in the Deep South, do you want to see my red bits,

Got the auger and axle, wheel brackets and wheels clean and shiny today and applied a few coats of red primer.

Had a look at getting the first part assembled today. The bolts that hold the wheels on were the first thing to do, one missing and one snapped a little warm up with the gas torch and the bit came out I then ran a 3/8 tap through the hole and found a couple of bolts in stock from an old mower deck. I now have enough to get the Auger fitted and on wheels, might give it a coat of paint first.

You could always use it for leaves!

Thanks Norm, it's good to have it driving after all this time. Soooo, what does it drive like? Well, very good as it happens.. MadTrax feels very stable and planted with not even a hint of "it's going to topple over" Oh, and it's fast... In high ratio of course.. Trying to work out the gearing is impossible, so I'm going to guess it will top out about 80mph.. Not that I fancy doing that sort of speed on a quad of course Off road it's just as good, it feels almost unstoppable. Rob and I were testing it by driving across deep ruts back and forth.. Eventually it started spinning the rear wheels, flick the switch to 4x4 mode and it pulled it's self out straight away.. Amazingly despite the testing abuse nothing broke! Me happy with that A few minor little problems to sort.. During the off road testing MadTrax did get rather hot, in a "needle in the red" sort of way! Part of the problem was an airlock in the cooling system, of course the highest point is where the temp sender is! As the water level in the expansion tank is no longer dropping I guess all the air has gone out the system.. The other part of the problem is while riding MadTrax, the engine is at high RPM but the quad isn't moving that fast to push cold air through the rad.. So I have got an extra cooling fan to fix to the outside of the rad, it should help things out.. One thing the engine is doing that I wish it wouldn't is it's running very rich! The carbs have already been cleaned out, so a bit of carb tuning and balancing will be done when MadTrax goes back together.. I did try and get some off road video footage, but for some reason I was having a bad camera day and didn't notice the camera was already recording.. So when I hit the "start recording" button to film the action, I was actually stopping recording! The end result was I had mostly footage of "the bits inbetween" rather than the action! No photo's other than this screen grab of MadTrax ripping up the grass.. The smoke is from the over fueling! MadTrax is now back up on the bench ready to be pulled apart tomorrow or Friday. Lot's of bit's to be "fully welded up", and painted.

A bit more work on the fuel tank was done, mostly welding up the odd hole I had missed. There's one! One or two on the underside as well. Not all the holes were that obvious, but putting a little compressed air into the tank made them easier to find.. Some bit's were just welded up to tidy them up. The exhaust system got the same treatment.. Find the holes and weld them up.. Finally the build had got to the "see if the drive system worked" point of things... Sooooo...... Which left only two things to do.. No 1.. Quickly give Madtrax some brakes.. Quickly as in back brakes only.. No 2... Get MadTrax off the bench and go for a test drive..

Morning all, not sure if anyone is still reading this, but if you are thanks and here's a rather large update for you. Starting with a video in order to try and keep things in order.. I hope you all enjoyed that.. So where were we?? Oh yes, mounting the bearings that make up part of the drive system to the front. The original mounts were trimmed back until only the plates with captive nuts were left. Here they are bolted to the back of the bearings, ready to be tacked onto the frame. The random bit of angle is there to keep the tops in line. And without the bearings, just tacked on. A bit hard to see in the next two photo's, the bearing mounts now have extra strength with gussets added.. As ever not fully welded in these pic's. The front er... prop/drive/transfer shaft thingy has been welded up, I will be adding some extra rows of weld "just in case" and to tidy the shaft up a bit. The other end is fitted in place with a tight fitting roll pin. Oh, if your wondering the shaft does look like it's running true One last thing to do before the drive system is finished... Attach all the sprockets to the shafts.. Starting with the first and second in line there was a bit of lining up work to do.. Here's No 1. A close up and you can see the chain wants to bend to the right or forwards if you will. A bit of extra space between the chain and bearing holder would also be nice.. At the other end of that chain things were also a bit tight between the chain and bearing.. To solve the problem this part came back out for a bit of turning so the sprocket could be moved away from the bearing. Before welding the sprocket onto the shaft (no space for a roll pin) Rob started toasting all of it.. As both the sprocket and shaft thingy were very cold, both were heated up so the cold metal wouldn't just suck the heat out of the weld. The 90 degree drive thingy out.. A big moment as it means everything will come out of the frame.. Phew lol While the drive system was out I was able to do a bit of extra welding inside the frame, as some bit's were only tacked together at this point.. For some reason I forgot to take load of pic's of the next stages, so the photo's might seem a bit random.. This bearing holder needed a few mounts.. Two mounts this side.. Making the mounts for this inside was more interesting, I also had to make lower mounts for the big blue bearing.. No photo's of this done but you will see it in the next video. Chain half links and a sprocket turned up, this is part of the chain tensioner, so the sprocket was bored out to take a bearing each side. The transfer box idiot light switches were removed as the exhaust would melt them also they are not really needed. A couple of ally blanking plates blocked the holes back up. The finished chain tensioner thingy.. I think a 30mm bolt head is about the right size and in no way oversized I think now's the time to drop in Part 24 of the build videos..