re-starting the hobby

hi im alasdair and have decided that i want to get back into the fighting robot scene,although my only experiance is a bunch of ants that we made at scholl and fought with in the science lab.sensubly im going for a fetherweight but i havent looked at anything to do with the sport since the end of the last season of tv wars and i think im very out of touch.i know my way around radio controle and things but havent got a clue for sorces of parts etc in the uk never mind scotlandso any help/advice/museings on this would be much apreciated also if anyone has a fetherweight for sale at a sensible price i would be interested
thanks muchly gents/ladies/anyone else?

Hi Alasdair, and welcome to the forum. Quick question, where in Scotland are you from?

If you check out the 'Starting Point' thread in the light & middleweight section, the focus in that thread turns to featherweights and there are a few links for parts etc in there. I've not got time for a thorough reply at the moment as I'm dashing off shortly but I'll post a list of some components and some links to them later tonight if no-one beats me to it :)

hey im currently at my mums house in the middle of the borders a wee place called walkerburn its about 16 mile from selkirk ware the corkscrew guys are/were

welcome back. As Jamie said read the hundreds of other threads on the forum. There have been several other recent I'm a beginner threads

What sort of design/ideas have you got in mind for a featherweight Alasdair? Or are you looking for a bit of inspiration first, or to see/hear what featherweights are like these days?

Here are a few links to my picture albums from featherweight events over the past couple of years:

Welsh Championship 2007
European Championships 2007
Tag Team Championships 2007
UK Championships 2008
UK Championships 2009
Tag Team Championships 2009

Also some videos from:
2009 UK Champs
2009 Tag Team Champs

Have a look through that when you've got some spare time, looking at the designs, what works and what doesn't. The main featherweight weapon groups are; passive/rambots, flippers, spinners, axes, crushers and lifters.
That's roughly the order of popularity too, mostly flippers and rambots at the moment. There are of course other designs possible, just depends on the limits of your imagination :)

Factors that may influence your design/build are money and facilities. What sort of budget are you working to? The cost of parts can vary in featherweights. Stuff like cordless drill motors (for drive) are around £10 each, electronic speed controllers to control them can be up in the £100 region. Building a weapon system into your robot makes for a more interesting build and can potentially be more effective and/or exciting in the arena but will add to the cost when you factor in the parts needed to create the weapon system.

What have you got tools-wise? Depending on where you build your robots and what tools you have can also affect your design. For example, I mainly build in my bedroom (sounds a bit crazy I know!) because I don't have a garage/shed/workshop. This means I use plastics such as HDPE (High Density PolyEthylene) and Nylon for my robot armour/chassis' because it can be cut and drilled easily using a drill and jigsaw/woodsaw. Much harder to cut steel in a bedroom, chances are the bed covers or carpet wont like the sparks created by an angle grinder :lol:

Let us know what sort of robot you're after and what you've got to work with and we should be able to help you out with info on parts and such. There are also several folk on here who offer machining work, fabrication and so on, so if you need a more complex part for your feather and your budget can accomdate it, you can have them make parts for you.

well i am a male so naturaly i crave destruction i have a few designs on paper at the moment butthey are only theroys atm the drill/plastic(also known as the cheep!) appels to me as i am expecting to take it home in a bin bag afterwards much like i had to all the time with my ant for all sooo many years ago but i did perfect an ant spinner that got band cause they couldent beat it so i may look at making a big version of that.tool wise i have a resonably stocked shed but no welding gear so again hdpe stuff looking like a good plan as i have a table saw for wood so that may make life easyer

Funny how scotsmen always go for spinners eh? :P

just out of curiosity typhoon_driver ere you involveed in the air cadets team and if so di you know a dr/mr hill?

Lol yeah I was back in the days of robot wars. I was the main driver for the team and yeah I know Roger well.

thats funny cause he will know of me quite well as his wife was my physics teacher and the one who got me into all this sort of thing

Lol small world :P

yer tell me about it

ok had a massive change of direction after scouting through the shed at what interesting bits i got and having looked atthem youtube vids i feel enclined to borrow a few ideas from storm 2 mabey make a 4 wheel drive set up thats similar with a tasty little lifter and an armourd front end so i can take out them spinners head on

There are currently very few spinners because there are only a couple of arenas that can take them.

im guessing that is due to the bits they tend to rip off opponants/themselfs i guessed that from reading up the rulles etc and i want a spinner but i think its better to have more options to compete and other desings give me that option

Yeah the number of parts that get thrown off robots by spinners could easily take out some audience members if it wasn't for the requirement that spinner-friendly arenas have to have a protective cocoon of polycarb.

Sounds like a good plan for your first FW to go for a non-spinner, that way it allows you to compete in more than one or two events a year and gives you a chance to try out your robot without worrying about encountering a spinner in your first ever battle.
To be honest though, even though there are some powerful brushless motor-powered spinners emerging, the age-old idea that every match against a spinner results in your robot being taken home in a bin bag in bits doesn't really hold true anymore. A robot doesn't need to be severly over-armoured to survive a spinner. As long as the general construction is quite robust and perhaps carries some thicker armour in the more exposed places, the majority of damage will probably be some torn edges or a ripped panel or two, simple repair job.

A four-wheel drive robot with a 'tasty little lifter' is pretty much the setup of one of my robots, Kaizer. It was really nippy around the arena but it's currently in bits because my teammate enjoyed driving it full-pelt into both the arena walls and the opponents' spinning discs, and I didn't really construct it robustly :)
Also, the tasty little lifter was actually quite slow and didn't get used much but it was a nice setup to have and could've been good at controlling a battle if the robot didn't handle like a five-year-old kid high on E-numbers!

So yeah, what all that rambling translates to is me saying that your plan of a Storm II inspired 4WD lifter robot is a solid platform for a good featherweight robot :)

humm in bits you say thier wouldent be any bits that you would take some form of payment for??? loved the bit about kids on e-numbers has givin me an idea for its name now that i have started to do designs rather than doodles

If there were some spare bits I would be happy to sell them on but, to be honest, there isn't much left to it. The wheels, drill motors and speed controllers and radio gear have gone into another robot, the batteries have been returned to their original owner (they were borrowed for two events) and all that is left is a beat-up chassis and the linear actuator for the lifter, which I'll be using again when Kaizer's rebuilt.

Sorry I can't be of any help in that respect, but if you need parts and want to try for second-hand stuff before buying new, just pop what you need in a post on the Wanted section of the forum and hopefully someone can help you out.

at the moment in mot sure what i need cause i am a weirdo in that i useally get the bits and build around them rather than the other way round i like the idea of making a waepon then working out how to mobilise it

this may sound like a mad question but could somone mesure up the drill motors/gearboxs that come from thouse cheep argoss drills and give me the dimensions as i am trying to make drawings so i know what i have to play with and i sudenly relised that i haven a clue what size the motors are :blush: