Sandcrawler Build Guide
As per the FAQ, Sandy is built around a 1997 Ford Superduty Champion v10 shuttle bus. She's got a steel frame welded to the bus frame that extends up and out to create the distinctive shape. Industrial PVC sheets (1/2 inch expanded pvc foam) are bolted to the frame. The steel extension and the PVC sheets can be removed for travel, allowing Sandy to be street legal on the road.
Sandy was conceived and built by a dedicated team of Jawas with help from many other 501st Legion Georgia Garrison members and friends. Our core build crew was:
We also greatly appreciated the support of Piedmont Plastics and ContraVision in the build phase. Thank you for your donations!
Sandy has also benefited from the mechanicing efforts of Quinn Meadows(TD 80438) and Kyle Roberts from Braxton Automotive. Thanks guys!
For the record, Sandy was pretty beat up when we found her. The outside looked good, but she had undiagnosed electrical problems, a totally destroyed steering stabilizer shock, and other random mechanical issues. Her inside was largely gutted, with only three bench seats remaining, a rack of cargo shelves installed instead of seating on one side and a hole in the floor where someone had gone through it to replace a fuel pump. Chronic leaks had also left most of her interior finish rotted. But, she only had about 130K miles on her and we didn't really want her for how she looked on the inside anyway, so we were happy to find her!
WRT how she got turned into a Sandcrawler, well, mostly this was a seat-of-the-pants process, trying to figure out how it would work as we went along. There is a bit of a planning document online where we tried to sort out ideas. You can read that here. There were things that we ended up changing on the fly, but that plan served as a springboard for thinking about how things might work. For the rest, take a look at the pictures below. We didn't really do a formal build blog, but the pictures give you an idea...
Enjoy!