How I Built My All-Terrain Tracked Vehicle out of Scrap Metal for Under $400 (Bug-Out Vehicle)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right it's gonna be an explanatory video on how it built my homemade all-terrain vehicle I call it the tank for short spelled almost entirely out of scrap metal and spare parts with the exceptions being the flat bar and metal use for the tracks and the bolts holding all together and screws and consumables but I'll go over all that as I go throughout this build I'm gonna be doing a general overview of how I built it what it's made out of and how it works I'm gonna try to stick to a process when explaining this so hopefully I'll answer any questions that you might have but if I miss anything which I'm sure I will is just because there's so much information to go over then please if you have any questions just ask in comments and I will try my best to get back to you so I'm gonna start from the ground up with the most dominant feature being the tracks the tracks are built out of 3/8 inch we rock crusher conveyor belt you can see it's just a rubber that's lined with this sort of fiber material to give it extra strength like says 3/8 of an inch thick which might not seem like much but considering the rubbers past life I think it's more than strong enough for what I need so obviously I couldn't just go with a rubber belt all the way around with holes cut in it because that wouldn't be nearly strong enough so I made these plates they're made out of 2 inch by 8 inch flat bar on top and bottom and then each other section has these four inch risers to keep it on the bogie wheels which I'll be getting to a little bit later they're just welded on and there are 55 track links in total so these are spaced 4 inches apart like I said it's two inch flat bar so is when calculating the total length I just had to be divisible by 6 that was guaranteed to get an even spacing between all these all the way around so originally it only had these two inch angle iron supports on it or track guides if you will and those were just not nearly enough to keep it on the bogie wheels so I ended up going with these every other seems to be effective enough top and bottom plate are held together with these 3/8 inch bolts I'd be sure to go with either nighlok or all-metal stop nuts just to make sure they don't go anywhere I like I said the track is 26 and a half feet long and a foot wide I thought that was the minimum I could get away with because I wanted to use the least amount of material possible because every inch added on multiplied by the number around would exponentially increase the cost which this is built on a very very small budget you'll probably notice that as I go throughout this build but it's functional nonetheless so you can see I have my front idler here which is just an old trailer axle that I shortened and it runs the entire length of the front of the vehicle and it's a solid 1 and 3/4 inch by 1 and 3/4 inch square steel axle so that's really what gives the front end the security and rigidity that it needs and these were originally a split ring they're quite old but they serve just exactly the purpose I need so I welded them together so there wasn't any movement because obviously any slop in the tracks could be detrimental so that's about all there is to that the three main bogies in the bottom are assembled basically like they would be on a triple axle trailer I had balancers in between each one and hanger there hanger there hanger there and hanger there and the hangers I would advise if you were to copy me I would go with something a little bit heavier than quarter inch flat bar it seems to do the job well enough especially considering how many there are and the vehicle doesn't really weigh that much so this is functional but if you were to use something a little more sturdy and permanent I recommend using something a little heavier than quarter inch these are mobile-home trailer axles these were readily available so this is what I went with tires are a little old and cracked but it works moving on to the back of the track this is sort of the the workhorse of the whole thing this is the drive sprocket for the whole track and one important thing that I'm going to mention to take note of if you ever build anything with tracks learn from my mistakes so obviously with this follows a curve or on the track and when you cut this out on a flat surface and you leave a four inch gap between this side and this side you would expect it to also correlate to needing a 4 inch tooth but that isn't the case the track rubber bends a a center midline right along here so what happens is when you get this curve these two points or this side of the track the edge is there and they're become closer together and you actually end up losing about a quarter of an inch in total so I had three and three quarters of an inch of a space to fill not four inches that I cut out so keep that in mind you can kind of see obviously it's slightly obscured by the curve of the two theory but you can see the distance there even though it's touching on the bottom and there that demonstrates what I'm trying to say the teeth themselves are actually the the drive line from the pickup truck where all the drive train came from got in half bent in a little bit to make it three and three quarters that I needed and then evenly spaced and welded the sprocket body itself is made from a steel rim that came with the truck with some sheet metal lining it that was cut out from a well pressure tank and that was done simply because I had it on hand and already had a nice curve to it so the way I did this is obviously I measured the circumference of the whole wheel cut it with about two inches to spare and then wrapped it around with a ratchet strap and got it really tight tacked it around welded it can see the welds aren't the greatest but they do hold and that's all I really care about and that seemed to do the trick so just some tips and tricks to help us speed along the process for you if you choose to follow in my footsteps so hopefully that answers any questions about the tracks as I said that came from the truck all this came from a trailer and this came from a boat trailer I needed a small idler originally the tracks just sagged and because the bottom of the tire was moving this direction top the tire this way in the same speed if this was touching the top of the track and moving on the bottom move along the top it wouldn't have any issues but I noticed a lot of bounce to the track that I just didn't like because it resulted in some D tracking incidences so I would recommend adding some kind of tensioner if you were to do this my original idea was to make the track a perfect length for the tires when they were deflated by half and then I would simply inflate them pull it tight but as you noticed there's still quite a bit and I think that's just because with all the stretching and tugging of this belt it was stretched a little bit but seems to do the job okay hopefully that answers any questions you have on the tracks you have anymore please just let me know go ahead and answer them if I can so moving on from that move for the back of the vehicle they'll give you a glimpse into the drivetrain as you can see it's a standard transmission from the 1992 Dodge Dakota that I scrapped all the parts from I build this and all the working functions there you can see the engine looked down to the transmission which is just leading straight into the rear axle of the pickup truck obviously I had to shorten the drive line by quite a bit and the rubber mount for the transmission to the support rail was broken on the vehicle when I got it it was kind of a junker but it was free so I can do the complain and it's just supported with this u-bolt here keeping it secure but still rubber on rubber so so vibrations are absorbed now rather than go through the trouble of actually building a engine mount what I decided to do was take the old truck frame you know the parts that mattered the support parts for the engine and the transmission basically I just cut that part of the rail out of the truck and drop it straight into this little cradle I made runs along here either side and up out of foreign channel which is really what all the main structure is constructed of as you can see for added support on this piece of the framework here I inserted a piece of three and a half inch by 3/8 inch flat bar welded it in place just to give the channel some more strength because as you can see this is where the rear axle of the truck which drives the drive sprockets is bolted in place so that's where all the torquing would try to rip that apart so just as an added safety I don't want to have to do any repairs if I can avoid them in the future so as a bounce of prevention that's why that's there one question that may have crossed your mind is how do I shift unfortunately I haven't finished the linkage to do that yet but this is what I had in mind so it's a manual 5-speed transmission but of course we the vehicle that I was given to build this project with was a 5-speed and beggars can't be choosers so this is what I had to deal with I removed the shift knob as you can see and I built this little carriage around it there's a rail here and a bearing here and here and that allows the motion necessary and down and left and right it's a little stiff so my idea is to someday add a solenoid between here and here and between here and here and use an Arduino to control the lever position that'll be sometime in the future I'm not sure yet when I get back to this project what I do I'll certainly give you guys an update the peel tank I'm using is the original fuel tank from the Dodge Dakota mounted here and this cradle made out of three and a half inch by three inch flat bar and the fuel filters mounted on the side and in tank filled pump so it's meant on the top and these bed pieces are removable ICSD bolts to access everything down there all of these silver panels that you see are cattle trailer decking panels they fit together with a lip and a hook on the bottoms and they really work perfectly for this cuz they already have the support structure underneath so I didn't need to be much bracing here's my fuel Inlet simple one and a quarter inch water pipe no problems whatsoever just don't tighten it all the way otherwise you'll end up creating a vacuum and it won't feed fuel to the system all right well we're back here I'll give you guys a glimpse of how I did my steering on this vehicle I use the original truck brakes and the rear their drum brake and simply attach master cylinders for steering up in the front to brake in each side independently using open differential in the middle so the way an open differential works is you have a certain rpm going in and then it gets translated through gears to be evenly distributed to both wheels but obviously when you're in a standard vehicle and you're turning the outside wheel load needs to be moving faster than the inside wheel and so has a gear assembly in there to divide the speed by both wheels depending on what's needed so by stopping one side I'm giving all of its speed to the other side and vice versa so that's how I chose to do my steering for this vehicle there was the simple most straightforward way and most of the parts I needed were already there as we moved to the front of the control section you can kind of see how the braking system works a little bit more opening a gear you've got two simple levers a right lever and a left lever that engage but are actually master cylinders but as long as they're generating hydraulic pressure it really doesn't matter these are from each from 1992 so there's a little bit of everything in history glads you'll see you know try to give you a complete list of every machine in this thing and I think you guys so I wanted this thing to be somewhat modular because I wasn't sure if this configuration would be a permanent solution so I built this frame out of some one and a quarter inch by 8 inch angle iron made from old I believe they were building pieces for like a quick put together structure that I was given you can see a lot of the the framework is made out of that simply because I had so much of it given to me as far as controls go there really isn't much needed I have a simple fuel pump switch and a keyed ignition unfortunately I did lose the key right the bigger so right now it has this remote start button hooked up to it but it works just it's not like anybody's gonna steal this thing this is the original gas pedal from the Dodge Dakota as you can see it's just pulling on a cable which is run through this quarter inch tube all the way around the frame back up and if we peer into the side access panel see it goes around here and all the way to the throttle low tech but very effective as far as the engine goes it's a 3.9 liter v6 originally it had about a hundred and eighty horsepower but I doubt if it's half that now this engine has seen better days but more than suits my needs so I'm not gonna complain and so far I've had no issues with it the truck when it came in did have some minor issues that needed to be fixed there was a hole in the radiator you can see there that was a quick solder job also you'll notice the radiator is at a very odd place but unfortunately with the placement of the engine that's just the best place for it to be and I haven't had any overheating issues with it so far it seems I can get a plenty of airflow and there's a lot of open space around it so I haven't had any issues like I said and because we it is a manual transmission we have the clutch pedal here which is hooked up today actually it's kind of ironic I used the clutch master cylinders for a different vehicle to steer make a break and I use the brake master cylinder for the clutch but it's what I had and we make do so the brake cylinder aka clutch cylinder line runs all along here along this rail where it was heated and then poked into the plastic line down there not exactly sure what material it is but originally it was a closed system between the master cylinder and slave cylinder so I had to jerry-rig got a little bit but actually no leaks surprisingly now you'll notice there is no battery compartment yet so I just had this battery sitting in the cab whichever cables leading to the positive and negative terminals unfortunately I was on quite a tight schedule to get this finished so I didn't have time to add a battery holder in underneath the hood but as far as functionality goes there's nothing wrong this setup as as it sits so I think that's most of the technical stuff now I'm gonna move on to just basic appearance and dimensions it's seventy four and a half inches wide so from the outside of the fender to the SI the fender it's 69 inches tall and it is almost exactly fourteen feet long now you might see some similarities in design I sort of halfway modeled it after the ripsaw eb1 which rift saw our line of vehicles produced by a company called how and how tech currently the world's fastest tracked vehicle so obviously that was sort of instrumental in designing the whole thing I had a few touches of my own obviously and it's much lower quality to be completely honest all of the skin all this here this is made from it was laminated on sheets of plywood for horse stalls and so I heated it and delaminated it and used it for just the body construction it's quite thin but it's more than enough again this has been kind of a short video overview on this thing I hope you enjoyed if you have any more questions I'm sure I missed something along the way then please feel free to comment and I promise that I'll at least try to get back to you guys now just recently started thinking about starting up a YouTube channel why document the process is on building things like this I wouldn't be opposed to maybe doing a version two someday so if you were interested in this and you wanted to see complete start to finish series on building a higher quality one out of better materials show support and let me know and if you'd like to see more projects like this or larger scale hopefully enjoyable fun things that are totally impractical and over-the-top then consider supporting my youtube channel this is gonna be the first video so hopefully only

Channel: Randomn

Views: 761,055

Keywords: how, to, build, built, make, create, home, made, homemade, tank, ripsaw, vehicle, tracks, tracked, track, off, road, offroad, off-road, all, terrain, all-terrain, metal, gas, full, sized, full-sized, rideable, fullsized, cheap, howto, scrap, junk, spare, parts

Id: goQI19cT6Jo

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019