My degree is over!!! Surprisingly I decided to relax by giving Binky some TLC.
In short she is fine electronically but has taken quite a lot of physical damage. The main one was to the armour when we landed from LF3 in the Melee.
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First thing I did was blast down the armours welds ready to have them beefed up/redone entirely. The welds that we paid for on Binky were weaker than the ones that we had done for free at Un for Conker 2. Go figure.
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I need to show how shiny the wheels look now but this is the state they were in before I washed them. Now they are grippy and shiny and free of grease from the GR02's which have been leaking; I don't think they are supposed to drip grease.
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The pulley cut a grove into the weapon motor shaft which took some effort to remove... very carefully. I filed down the grove and then gently sanded it so the pulley now goes back on without catching.
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The broken Cir-clip was a pain to replace but I got it off. Took the opportunity to look inside the HK-40. It's been balanced with this blue paste which I found slightly amusing.
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Got an issue with the bulkheads where, despite putting in the steel spacers that they come with, they are slowly eating the flanges. I need to solve this quickly before it fails during a fight and the disc goes flying. One of the bearing had also ceased up totally and the other was pretty stiff. Both had lost a lot of grease which I think is probably the reason why they have both basically failed. They were like £12 each from RS too so not exactly cheap-o's. Maybe I will have to get the £40 ones.
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Also blasted down the disc in preparation for hutting off the inner teeth. They do little for the inertia and are really sharp so I would prefer to use the 150g elsewhere.
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The next phase after this is to start planning exactly what improvements we are going to make. The main ones I think are to reshape the front to better expose the disc and also do what is done on LH3 and link the armour to the base with a lip of metal and bolts round the bottom. This will drastically stiffen the machine up and mean that the disc will be the first thing to hit another robot rather than the wedge.
There are also plans to make a alternative weapon head, basically a vertical version of NST's bar. The disc has a 12mm gap under it to reach the base plate so the new bar can be slightly wider and spin faster which would give it better engagement.