Measuring and test-driving the foresting machine (Antti)
Dragonbane DiarySaturday, January 3rd, 2005
Turku, Finland
The day began at 09:00 at our Turku workshop. We loaded some of our tools to our car and started our trip towards Loimaa where the foresting machine that will serve as a chassis for our dragon is located.
Once we arrived to Loimaa we started to test drive the machine. It performed nicely and because it's steered by flexing entire body around midpoint, it gave a very bestial impression. We also noted that thread marks didn't look much like tire marks, and in the terrain of game area it should leave very shallow marks.
After driving we started measuring the machine. I had noted that it went backwards as easily as forwards so I made a suggestion that we should build our dragon so that the forresting machine will be
backwards, as it will be much easier to attach the neck and wings to the rear of the machine. It seemed like a good idea so we did rest of measurements based on that assumption. First we took two strings as long
as the neck and tail so that we got a good idea of the length of the final dragon. We made a note of the fact that the tip of the tail was about ten meters away from the point where the chassis turned, so if we made very sharp turn the tail would be moving at alarming velocity, I think we need to implement some safety precautions for it.
After that we proceeded to take lot of measurements from the machine so we can finish our scale model that we can then use to design where we will insert all the equipment we need inside the dragon. We also made
some notes how we could build silencers for the engine, this shouldn't be too hard because the engine isn't very loud.
Antti Oksanen
