Thank you all for those encouraging words. Stephen – you do have a way with words as well as modelling. Peter, plastic alphabet´s can be found at Hannants.
Idlers
The last work on the wheel arrangement was the idler wheels, idler axles and the housings.
I tried hard to work out if it would be possible to modify Armortek’s idler to a more accurate wheel, but failed to find a way to achieve that “bottleneck” look behind the outer disc of the wheel.
An opportunity opened itself when an US-modelling friend needed help with making CAD produced idlers for his 1/10 Tiger II model. I helped him with dimensions and realized I could have more accurate ones made in 1/6 scale using his program.
Idler wheels
Said and done, after some tweaking of details and dimensions to fit my needs this is what I got; idler consisting of three major parts plus the hubcap;
The "bottleneck" of part A;
The backside of parts B and C;
Some additional work was done on the spokes filing them into a v-shape, a total 48 of them, tedious work to say the least;
I wanted to use the Armortek ball bearings and that meant the front one had to be glued and then an alu disc with the holes for the hubcap had to be glued in front of the bearing and then machined to the right depth;
At the back I machined the center and covered the four screws that hold the three parts together with a machined alu disc with 8 scale bolts. A steel disc acts on the bearing but doesn´t have contact with the alu around it;
On the hubcap extra material was added to the inside just to make it more true to scale and just for the fun of it;
Idler axles
The real challenge came with trying to do the axles both true to scale but also strong enough as there is quite a lot of force on these axles when turning in terrain. Through visits at the Swiss museum in Full I managed to get enough measurements to do this.
I started by drilling holes for the axles in five steel pieces (one as back up);
By removing some material by hacksaw followed by milling I got a rough shaped rear axle body. The individual axles were kept in place with grub screws and spring pins. This allowed me to remove and assemble each axle whenever I needed to work on them;
The rounding of the axle body was first done in the mill and followed by machining in the lathe;
Last some filing achieved the final steps. Photo below show the left side filed to a curve;
The housing
These were machined from stock material and have a brass bearing glued in. Four bolts hold them in the lower sides;
I wanted to use the Armortek track tensioning system, but with some alterations. I didn’t want the idler axles to be completely stiff, instead I wanted some suspension effect. I used the bump stops provided in the kit, mounted on a plate. The track adjusting bolts rests on the rubber providing just enough of that ‘give’ I was after, inside view;
outside;
Finishing touches
I put steel rods trough the spring pins before the axles was silver soldered in place and a metal strip was soft soldered on to the body on both front and back;
On the idler wheels I machined in a white metal plate with cast no’s and after some puttying and sanding I added a cast surface;
The hole in the metal strip is for a grease nipple.
In hindsight I´m not 100 % happy with the corner radius (way to large) of the pattern of each disc which means I´ll take the wheels apart and try to correct these in the future.
Per
this is all very very impressive and a little daunting as I think it will take me a few hours to clear away the cobwebs from my model as its been so long since I touched it 
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