HardWired - Upgrades and general build diary

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Greetings, one and all!

My name is Matt, and I have no idea what I'm doing. Still, I managed to build my own FeatherWeight, HardWired (assuming nobody has that name already) which was...
Well, let's just say I battled it against an old DVD player, and the DVD player won. Here it is in its current state -


I will get some more photos up when I can but my camera is battery-less at the minute...

I made the entire thing for around £60, taking inspiration from the likes of Bitza and Sumpthing. Unlike Bitza or Sumpthing, however, HardWired isn't really competitive at all. That's where this build diary comes in!
I figured that I might as well post my ideas and plans for the robot here, as well as the progress so that you can see how I'm building it and indeed, how often I'll need the fire extinguisher. Looking at some of the build diaries here and there, there's been some great bits of advice exchanged, and I was rather hoping that this could be the same, since I literally have no idea what I'm doing. I'm a decent enough driver, but when it comes to building the thing...

So, specs. The robot is made from a single aluminium box -yep, no chassis, it's just one great big piece of aluminium that's been bent into shape - and it's about 2mm thick. Got two 12v B&Q Drill motors + gearboxes directly mounted into it, with wooden wheels w/ bike tyres directly onto the drill shaft. It's using some awful, awful homemade speed controllers that are basically bits of servo and microswitch glued together, and it runs on 12v at the minute. The wedge did lift up, once. Then, the plywood broke.

Plan is to made a steel (?) box section frame for the robot to add some weight and to make it a lot tougher, and then mount that inside an aluminium box, as well as have a more tough baseplate to mount some Gimson 24v motors onto, with some chunkier wheels too, maybe upgrade to 4WD through some chains/belts or something. Obviously have 24V batteries in there as well, but I'm hoping to add a linear actuator or something to be able to lift up the wedge at the front, which will also have a tougher frame on it to stand up against the spinners out there.

I am in two minds though, I'm changing that many things in it, that I might as well call the new machine HardWired II and enter the old setup as Hardwired I in a competition, have it get taken apart by a spinner, because it'll definitely look good!

Probably should mention too, I'm going a video build diary on Youtube for a 'rebuild' of the first HardWired, as well as the second, sort of in a comedic fashion i.e. Top Gear and the idea of the first one was for it to get absolutely destroyed afterwards in a competition, hence leading on to the second one... That was the plan in any case, whether or not it happens is another thing completely.

So yeah, just going to be documenting any plans or building work here, any advice at any point is greatly appreciated!