Go Ugly Early (FW)

[Wkdintent]

Two weeks ago, I thought I only had a few minor things left to do, and I'd be good to go.
Fast forward to the evening of the final Friday, and I'm still not quite there. Even though the self-righting is now working, I still need to attach the HDPE armour, which I can do on Saturday.

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I arrive early and get set up, lots of people being very friendly and chatty. There's even a lot of interest in my use of aluminium extruded bars to build the chassis.

I'm all cued up for the FW melee, nervous and excited. I try and drive into the arena and, no movement... Turns out my newly added armour is so close to the floor, that once the bot is on it's wheels, they compress enough to remove all of the clearance. Balls.

Removing a 4mm spacer between the wheel mounts and the base plate, I'm good to go, again.

Show 2 and this time, not only do I get into the arena, but survive long enough to notice that I'm a) a rubbish driver, and b) struggling to do anything but a series of pirouettes.

Afterwards, I find that the reason for the latter was that one of my 4" 'stealth wheels' has cracked around the hub, and the other hanging on by a thread. A trip to Toolstation later and I have a set of trolley wheels which will be replacements.

Sunday morning arrives and after help from David; Paul of Team Solar Flare, and RoboteerNat, Go Ugly Early is ready to roll again, for about a minute...
As very shortly after the start of the next battle, I see a little puff of smoke, and the return of the bloody pirouettes.

A burnt out motor which should have ended my weekend, but a borrowed 550 (again from Nat) allowed me into the last fight of the weekend.

And it seems I was forth time lucky, as finally nothing went wrong! I still can't drive very well, but at least I knocked a few bots over. I was having a great time, until the house robot decided to carve it's way through the arena, knocking four of us into the pit.

Overall an awesome weekend with great people; and after I've earnt back some brownie points with the missus, I'll be back with version 1.1.

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[Wkdintent]

After a few months of doodling and silly ideas, I began work on version 1.1. The plan was to get her ready for RL Grantham, and just in the nick of time, here she is.

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Most of the hardware has been reused from version 1, because I'm cheap and it worked fairly well. The most obvious change is the removal of the (pretty ineffective) front hinge flipper, and replaced with twin lifting forks.

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Each fork is made up of three 4mm hardox, plasma cut pieces, which are bolted together. The outer two are small, reversible pieces that protect the larger central one; which itself is part of the lifting arm. The forks are then joined together by two aluminium covers. This should mean that if one fork takes a horizontal hit, the other can help share the load.

My company recently bought a laser marking machine, so I thought it would be rude not to decorate the lower of these aluminium covers.

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A quick test using gym weights suggests that the assembly can lift 16kg, easily covering the FW class limit.

I've even found time to give her a coat of paint, but it seems I'm better at engineering these things than decorating them.

Hopefully this weekend will be more successful than last time.