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. |
For two years in a row I've missed out joining in with Ian Watts robot bash at the Uni. So I'm making sure I've got something running before it swings around again. So I welded a couple of new gearbox cages into the 4 wheel push bot, and dug out a set of Electronize speed controllers. I fitted the titanium plate that has been cluttering the basement for a decade and have been doing some testing with a set of LiON batteries that used to belong to a cordless strimmer, which fell apart from overuse. I've run it up and the battery doesn't really have enough life to power 4 motors, but is useful for testing. I've stuck some old NiMH units on a charge cycle to see if they have enough life for a bout or two. The only things I actually need to "buy" are a 2.4GHz radio set, as the old 40MHz stuff is against the rules these days, so I've ordered a Hobby King 4 channel set for £20 off ebay. Strangely yesterday Mentorn emailed a bunch of robot folk to
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