Virtual Progress!

 Ok so I haven't made much actual progress in the past couple of weeks but I have made some pretty big strides in the virtual world. Still teaching myself 3D AutoCAD again, I managed to come up with this drawing for the 6 gear boxes:

 Since AutCAD doesn't use my graphics card, I had to draw the gears as discs so things move smoothly. When I was all done with this, I put together a 2D file for the laser cutter at The Hack Factory.

 These are all the parts I'd need for one gear box made out of .090 thick acrylic. It should have been a simple upload and cut sort of thing but to my dismay, I drove a half hour to get to there and found out the laser cutter was not working properly and also that the software to run the thing is some horrible program called MoshiDraw. No good came of this and so now.. I wait...

 In the mean time I've been teaching myself AutoDesk Inventor via Youtube videos and a free student copy. It took some getting use to and a lot of frustration but I think I've figured it out for now. So here's a video of the gear assembly in action..

I managed to figure out how to combine parts and drive the motor gear to, intern, drive the other gears along with the wheel. Pretty cool stuff. And now, today, I quickly drew up the box and suspension arms which also have a bit of animation to them too. Unfortunately I was having trouble mirroring my gearboxes so I could have all 6 in place. Something about not being able to copy holes and constraints so I'll work on that a bit more. So this is what I've got so far:

 Sorry for the screwy phone pic. I'm in a hurry to upload this and run off to work. Hope you enjoy my progress and hopefully I'll get some parts laser-ed out soon!