Overhaulin' the Trucks

I printed out some test parts for the set of trucks I designed last week, and there were a number of things I didn't like about them.

Ultimately the four wheel design intruduces as many problems as it solves. Also this design was going to use rubber bands for the tensioning or 'suspension' of the truck, which adds unnecessary parts and more potential points of failure.

Looking at how some other designs work, I noticed they often just use the springiness of the plastic to accomplish this without the need of extra parts that can fail.  Being designed in TinkerCAD, many of the small tweaks I would need to make to use these would take forever.  

I decided to scrap the whole design, and put something together in OpenSCAD because it will allow me to use parametric inputs so I can tweak the measurements of the design without having to re-do a whole bunch of work each time.

This design uses a slit near the third wheel so the plastic can flex creating tension against the tower.  I'm writing the scad script so it can render the top, bottom, or both, and display them in their final position or offset for an 'exploded' view.

Here you can see where I've started modelling the attachment points for the belt.

This is still a work in progress, but I started doing some test prints using the new eSUN PLA+ that I have.  PLA+ is much stronger than traditional PLA, so these trucks shouldn't have much play in them or sloppiness. 

eSUN contacted me on Thingiverse after seeing all the makes I had done using their filaments.  They sent me a couple of 1 kg rolls of their new PLA+ filament to try out.  So far I've been really impressed. I'm editing a video that I will post soon giving some of my initial impressions.

They are looking good so far, but I need to get the third wheels printed and take some measurements before I can finalize the design.  

In an effort to differentiate from the crowd, I'm going to use a larger third wheel (not pictured here)  so each truck will have one big wheel and two little ones.  I'm going to call it the BigWheel(tm) and its going to look awesome.