Well, once again I had almost no time to do do a ton of work on Richie: this time I had a day and a half to fit new wheels, new motor mounts, a Lipo, and self righting in time for Guildford... I got 3 hours sleep before the event...

The new wheels worked great, all for the cost of £0.00.
All I did was replaced the rubber sheets that made up my wheels with a thick piece of plywood which I lathed round, and then screwed bike tread into. Had no problems with them at Guildford and they had plenty of grip. Also mean I now have about 2cm of ground clearance which is a great improvement, and very much appreciated at Guildford!

The new motor mounts I made worked well too; They were just some blocks of HDPE and wood machined to fit the motor and house a support bearing. I also shifted the motors forward about an inch for better balance. Unfortunately the new wider wheels meant that the back of the motors were less than 1mm away from the linear actuator slider, which meant that when Major Damage decided to hammer me whilst I was on my side, my motors were shifted in and caught on the actuator, which tore out one of the screws holding the motor to the gearbox, leaving me with a very bent drive motor. Marco kindly lent me a hammer to beat it straight again, and I made it through the last two fights fine, but I plan to entirely replace the gearbox housing with metal, and add a rear motor support. They'll basically end up looking a bit like the motors that Gimson sells if all goes to plan.

The Lipo conversion caused an interesting problem; as I no longer had a 2.5Kg SLA in the back of my robot, every time I tried to lift someone I would just tip forward instead. This means I'll have to spend most of my spare weight adding big armour plates or something to the back. I also intend to move my motors to the back when I have time for the 4wd upgrade, which should help a bit.

I fitted a wing type schrimech to Richie before the event, but didn't have time to try and get it working until the break between shows. I quickly found it was much more effective just to have them stuck out permanently, so I plan to replace them with just a bit of stiff plastic pipe. Not pretty, but effective!

Still, all problems aside, I still drove into every fight, and even drove out of a few! Was a lot of fun, and am planning to do a lot of upgrades when I get more than a day or two to work on it!

Oh and on a side note, if anyone here does antweights and is looking for an ESC, I've finally started taking orders on my home made antweight speed controllers. See http://robotwars101.org/forum/viewto...=2128&start=75 for more details.