Sorted, ish! Pretty much got my exams out of the way, so now I can get onto more important things, like building robots

Quote Originally Posted by Liftoff View Post
Depends on the dimensions of your robot, 5mm steel all round will be quite heavy, maybe you could get your hands on some stronger material and reduce the thickness of the armour.
The machine's only going to be quite small, intending to make it as compact as possible so that I can get it more heavily armoured. Not got the exact dimensions down, but the main box is going to be even smaller than HardWired I was, and that was tiny...
I've been looking at some stronger material, but again the budget means I'm really tied to what I can go for, and these steel offcuts are the cheapest thing I can get for what I'd need... I have considered Hardox or similar, but I can't find it at a decent enough price to make it a viable armour, with starting again from scratch with new (non-homemade and therefore working) ESCs, new transmitter/receiver, motors and all that! Thanks though, I'll definitely look into some tougher material when the inevitable rebuild comes along somewhere down the line!

Quote Originally Posted by plargen View Post
i use 5mm steel on scruffy but i had to use 2mm steel in the base and ali top plates to keep it in weight
Ah, I see - I've got some aluminium spare from Hardwired I (well, it used to actually be HardWired I) so I'll definitely give that a use in this one. It's only going to be a small one, and hopefully I'll be able to get the bar spinner cleanly in the weight limit too, but I guess I'll see how that one goes! Have you had positive experience with 5mm steel in combat? It seems like it'd be able to stand up to things, but I have no experience of using it myself!

Quote Originally Posted by Max View Post
Bare in mind that if you go for brushless drive then you've got to make you own gearboxes, and because its brushless you will need a huge reduction, either 2 or 3 stage. To do that you at least need access to a decent pillar drill and be really precise but ideally you need a milling machine to make the gearbox plates. I would guess you are looking at at least £75 for the gearboxes assuming you go for the reduced price gears on technobots.
Yes, that's one of the downsides of that I suppose... I've been looking at a few different options and I'm going to try and get those made/adapted from something else as cheaply as possible, I've got a few gears to hand at the minute so I'll attempt to get that done, or something along those lines. The motors I'm looking at (http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/s...0KV_2665W.html) appear quite beefy and low-ish RPM so hopefully I won't have to reduce the speed as much, but I don't know. All a bit of a learning curve from here, experimenting and seeing what goes best! Need to do a bit more research on how to figure out amps and watts and all that sort of thing - it's tough being a roboteer when you're electronically illiterate haha!

Quote Originally Posted by Ellis View Post
5mm steel is usable, but for the weight you're probably better off working with some sort of wear-plate, like Hardox. Same weight as steel but for combat it completely outclasses it. It's hard to find 3.2mm anymore, but 4mm Hardox will prevent pretty much anything from getting into your machine and it'll be worlds tougher than 5mm steel. That said there's the cost to balance, and 5mm steel will do the job, it just may get bent by some of the harder hitters.

As for brushless drive I don't think you're looking at huge cost for the reduction, really. Around the feather drive scale the rpm is pretty versatile. The typical 550 drill motor spins at around 20,000rpm. You can get that and lower with brushless fairly easily.

You won't be able to use completely unmodified innards from a drill gearbox, as it'll most likely shred itself under much more power than the normal 550 size, but if you don't drop in a huge motor and you take the right procedures I can sort of see that working. With an expectancy of short run time, anyway, haha.

An alternative, though it ramps up price a bit, is to mate a brushless to a Banebots gearbox.

Good luck anyway, will be interesting to see brushless drive in action.
Ah, brilliant! I have been looking at Hardox but it's a lot more expensive than I thought! Most of the suppliers want you to buy a big sheet of it too, which is a bit of an expensive and scary thought! Thanks though, glad to know it'll at least stand up to stuff - it's not a permanent solution I don't think, I'm wanting to get tougher armour but it's the whole cost thing again - still having to cut corners despite raising my budget to £200!

Also nice to hear too, the motors I've seen are around 8000 RPM at the voltage I'll be running them at (6S) so hopefully I don't need too drastic a reduction... that said, I'm sure something will go wrong along the way! The drill gearbox is a sound idea too, definitely look into giving that a go - might not last as long as you said, but it's a step in the right direction for future incarnations! Definitely look into getting the gears swapped out for metal ones if they're plastic though, because that's a recipe for failure in itself!

Thanks too Hopefully it'll be something different in any case, I think it'll require a lot more work than I'm anticipating to get it running properly but maybe it'll end up being a neat new feature, and it'll mean I don't have to hack my own ESCs to save a bit of money!




And I apologise for the short essay there, catching up on replies a bit!