The transfer of power

Fooling

I spent a surprising amount of time fooling around with the transmission setup. As soon as I had the motor-containing piece attached to the left edge of the tub, I battled the empty one into the right edge. First I tried to attach it by the bottom screw, as it made most sense to me. Wrong. It was to be attached by the frontmost screw, because that way the rest of the pieces would lock in properly.

Of course I had looked at the guide a bit funnily and one of the cogs was awfully wrong and I only noticed that when I was dropping the drive sprocket's cogs in their places. So what could I do but to open the setup, move the cog into its right place and reassemble everything.

I really should remember to lubricate all those cogs

Deviation is the best way to start anything

At this point the instructions guide you to slap on the road wheels and the tracks and then proceeding with the rest of the tank. I was pondering, if I should do it the other way and yes, I'd assemble the wheels but build everything else before finishing this particular subassembly.

The reason why I want to leave the tracks last is the simplest one: otherwise all the painting would be made way more difficult for absolutely no gain. I'll rather spray all the paints first, with a degree of confidence in having everything covered, including the shadowed and blocked areas. Because if you go and trust that "those surfaces will never be seen", those are the first ones to be seen when you take the first photo of the (more or less) completed model. And that is not fun, everyone knows that.

Therefore I quickly built the drive sprockets and idler wheels and went on for my summer vacation. This week - while you read this - I may have something decent done on the deck side of the build.