| 8/7/03 Carrot Cubed - The "quick" chassis rebuild of KC2 | |||
| We worked KC2 hard at Modelworld 2003, and after about 6 fights, there were signs of the real damge we'd taken from Disco and Mr Psyches. the chassis had hairline cracks, as well as whole members bent beyond repair, so we decide it was time for another robot. I already had a new ram, care of STORM, a 50x135, that I intended to run at full pressure. I had new gearboxes and a pair of CIM2 motors,I had a set of Hawker SBS15 batteries, I even had a cellar full of new ERW steel for the chassis, and money set aside for a set of Robots-R-us Speed controllers.... but as with all things Robot wars it doesn't go tthat smoothly. I came to scrap the chassis on KC2, and looked at the components and thought it was probably worth spending a "couple of days", rebuilding the chassis, so we had a fun live event machine. This was fuelled by Noel Poncelets flipper spreadsheet, which occupied hours of my time, fiddling this and that to see what would happen. eventually I decide it would be worth building a platform to test the spreadsheet, and quickly cobbled together a CAD plan of the new chassis.  It took AGES to build, simply ages, and at the end of the day I'm not sure if we're any better off. In theory the new chassis and flipper geometry should throw a robot about 73cm on the air, 18cm clear of the flipper, which would be great, as we old ever managed a limp bit of lifting with KC2. Unfortunately as with all things RW Compomises creep in, and the end result is a bit of a bodge up, not enough flip for what we want, and nowhere near the armour we need... but hey this could be the last great swansong for KC2.  |
So, for a bit of light relief I bought a few of Justin's LED Christmas tree kits. I think the original idea was to have a relatively easy kit to put together on Saturday workshops in the run up to Christmas, but they seem to have become quite popular with all manner of folk. Anyway, the kit is based around a couple of well made pcbs, a bag full of components, and the simple instruction that +ve is UP. It took about 10 mins to solder all the bits together, and with a huge amount of satisfaction over the end result. Justin and his Christmas tree kits can be found here: http://cyber-lane.com/ The Build Brighton Christmas workshops will be running each Saturday from 30th November to 21st December from 10am – 2pm. Entrance is completely free. Kits are priced between £2 and £5. #BuildBrighton can be found here: http://www.buildbrighton.com/blog/
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