Posted 12/25/15

So, it’s Christmas day and I’m on a Southwest flight from Columbus, OH to Kansas City (via Chicago) to play in a bridge tournament.   On the way, I’m taking the opportunity to work on my latest blog post. describing Wall-E2’s new front wheel guard design.

The impetus for front wheel guards comes from Wall-E2’s tendency to re-enact the ‘Tractor-tipping’ scene from the Cars’ movie.   On occasion Wall-E2 encounters an obstacle like a chair leg with one front wheel or the other at just the right orientation so that it is able to climb up the leg with it’s 4-wheel drive, and, when it achieves a high enough angle, it’s relatively high CG does the rest.   So, after the novelty wore off, I decided it was time to do something about the situation.   After discussing options with my grandson Danny in a Skype session, we decided that two small wheel guards would probably work better than one big one, so that was the design direction we took.

In the year or so I have been working with TinkerCad and my 3D printing setup, I have learned that it is usually much faster and more effective to rapidly ‘evolve’ a design rather than trying to get it right the first time.   A complete design-print-evaluate cycle only takes about 30 minutes, with negligible material cost, so why not!?

In the case of the front wheel guards, the design evolution went through about a half-dozen iterations, (not counting the initial one done ‘on the fly’ with Danny during the Skype session using my pocket knife and a section of a cardboard box).   The ‘evolution of a modern wheel guard’ is shown in the following photo, proceeding from proto-guard on the left to fully modern wheel guard on the right.

Bumper evolution from ‘slime-mold’ to ‘fully evolved’ versions

The finished (as if anything is ever finished’ on Wall-E2) wheel guard is shown at the far right in the above photo, and the following shots show the installed result.

Side view of guard installation with wheel removed for better visibility

‘Fully Evolved’ wheel guard installed on left front wheel

Both wheel guards installed

I haven’t had a chance to try the new wheel guards out in practice, but I am quite confident they’ll do the job, and end Wall-E2’s short stint as a ‘Tractor-Tipping’ mimic! ;-).

Stay Tuned,

Frank