Well the way to make this robot reliable is to stop the overvolting. There is no loss of top speed by changing the motors to 18v and going 24:1, only a bit of explosiveness. Would be a shame to lose that, but you can push a robot with bosch 35s if you can get underneath, so the way the machine works would be the same.

And it would probably improve my driving, having everything a bit calmer.

That would cost something like 60 quid to do. Very little to pay to gain reliability.

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We're also overvolting the lifter motor. Recently it smells of overworked motor even if you run it literally for a second. We don't know the history of it (found by some bins), so for all we know it has always been close to going home.

Looking at this as a replacement motor: http://www.pollin.de/shop/dt/Mjk0OTg2OT ... 5G_AS.html

The can looks to be almost identical to the one in the drill. We'd lose some power in the weapon, but it has buckets of it, so it shouldn't be a problem. And for that money it's worth getting one to find out.

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Other than those potential upgrades (downgrades?) we updated the wiring last night. Thinking about putting some bike tyre on the blue wheels as with just 3mm of clearance I'm worried about bottoming out at the champs.