Thanks guys,
There is a 3V lithium battery in the prime mover,
which provides power to the motor and rxer.
Another in the first trailer and one in the last.
They power the LED’s and those that drive the fibres.
I orignially wanted to put the highlights down the side of the trailers, but the fibres were more direction than first thought, so you couln’t see them from all angles, so I stuck with front and rear. So there was no need for the center trailer to carry a battery.
I also considered a mercury switch that switched the brake lights on when the trailer slowed down,
but there wasn’t really enough inertia to make it work properly, so I canned that idea too.
The final failure was a bullbar. I searched high and low for anything that had one I could transplant, to no luck. I tried building them with
plastic beams from the hobby shop. I even tried moulding one out of 5 minute epoxy and blutac mould. Yeah, maybe I should have taken a photo of that mess.
The original truck was one I got from HK when I was working there, the others were from GoLo.
They were really crappy and I destoryed a few trying different ideas like gears and dual motors to make up for lousy torque of the original.
I freaked when I finally got enough torque, but the single axel didn’t have enough traction.
The original batteries were also too light, the extra weight of the lithium batteries combined with 4WD worked well. The added friction just added to the illusion of poor accelleration of road trains.
.
