| 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.  |
All of the robots I have built have failed in fights, and usually at the axles/wheels, it's like a running joke. So why should it be any different with this featherweight? Meathammer was designed back in 2005/06 when using 4 drill motors was a bit of a novelty... it was made more novel still by mounting the epicyclic gear cages directly to the chassis, which unfortunately sends all the drive shocks back through the gearbox. The original version ran for a number of fights at modelworld 2006? and even won some, especially the sumo, which favoured its very low profile. I've just rebuilt the gearboxes with all metal gears, and tested it, and it seems it should last for at least one fight… but as I put it in the car after testing, I noted one of the wheels had nearly fallen off. Mark that bolt for Lockthreading! All this got me thinking if I could make something less likely to lose a wheel, break a gearbox etc I have a huge pile of bits and bobs that were destined for heavie...
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