Piecing together a budget heavy

[Shakey]

I know A123 is more unusual for a cheap heavy but for the price they were vs. price of SLAs and the fact they'd be useful when I hope to upgrade to a better bot. I'm not aiming high for the first version and by 'weapon' it'll just be a lifter or something (Anything a scooter motor and screw jack can actuate!), just give my robot something to do in the arena really. Another vote for the TZ85/Botzbitz is good aswell (I've run them on a 6cell liPo 25.2V with no problems for a while now).

I'm going to be trying to make sure my robot is interesting for the crowd, I know how much work EO's put into events and I'm sure they'd much rather have a robot the crowd will enjoy watching in the arena (On that note I absolutely love watching team saint robots fight). This is partly the reason my feather has an axe as opposed to a lifter or pusher (Not that there aren't pushers or lifters that can put on a good fight!).

Chassis wise to keep the cost down I was going to go with steel square section to build the frame, reinforce it at all the joints with bits of sheet steel. Then thick HDPE bolted onto the top of it all as armour (With an airgap to help stop axes touching the components), I have a small amount of Hardox I'll try and use to armour the front. I'll be aiming for invertible as I've seen how hard it is to stay upright in the arena. :P I have an arc welder to weld it all together with and can get decent welds going after building my feather. The chassis construction method is based on this guy:

Apologies for the mess but it's pretty immobile after it burnt out a motor so has been living in the same spot since we moved in! but it's a 40kg robot that can (and has accidentally been) run into a tree at 20mph and happily survived with no damage, not to mention far too many falls than a non combat robot should face :P). It's split chassis with a mini wheel bearing in the middle to act as suspension. I think scaling the same method of square section with triangles of steel to support it should work (As long as I reinforce the square section itself not to buckle).

This is what I currently have to work with:

2 24v wheelchair motors of unknown speed
30 A123 cells
0.5x0.5m square of hardox
and my feathers battery charger (which'll do 6 A123 cells)

So far I've spent £60 on the heavy, with 3 TZ's and a screwjack that'll add maybe another £70 and finally the cost of square tube and HDPE.

One thing I am wondering is that the tread don't the wheelchair wheels is pretty worn out, would wide bike tread screwed onto the wheels be any good?

Those LiPodapters look interesting, I'll have to do more digging into those.