Team Riptide Birmingham Chronicles

[mrsam]

Haven't updated this in a while, i had planned on a big post Beetleweight Champs run down but, it was a flop for both Atom and Lynx, neither worked how they were supposed to. Atom has gone to a new home awaiting upgrades and Lynx has been given a complete rebuild and a new name to go along with it. May i introduce "Swag Demon"



It's Lynx, but built better, with more care, attention and i didn't build it in a rush. Hopefully the problems of the first version have gone from this one.

Now you may have noticed a familiar face in the last picture, that my friends is the new Hatchet (Hatchet 3 to be precise, #Howinthehellamionmythirdalready). I should note that mid 2015 i moved into my own flat, and as such lost almost all of the nice tools and workshop space that made me look like a half decent builder, i am now building with hand tools so stuff is now rough, very rough.

Anyway, Hatchet 3..

I liked Hatchet 2, it worked well (when the link stayed in) and it proved at the World champs that it can tussle with the big boys. Having said that, it had it's problems. It was tool tall, too big, the top armour was a joke and the axe whilst looking aggressive actually did very little in the way of damage. Through talks with other builders i've realized the reason for this is how the axe was made, it was strong as hell and very well made, but it had it's weight in all of the wrong places and as such wasn't making the most of the energy.

So i decided to start again, start from the ground and make my way up, keeping the good and getting rid of the not so good. The Electronic side of things, drive motors, esc's, batteries, weapon motor and weapon esc have all stayed, they worked well so i see no need to change them. The axe is gone and will be replaced with something that i feel should be better. Speaking of.....



This is my design for the new axe, taking inspiration from a few different places. It's going to be a single 10mm thick piece watercut from hardox 500. It weighs roughly the same as the old axe but there's a couple of major differences, 1) The kink in the axe arm inspired by a very well known Hammer bot, after watching back footage of Hatchet 2 it was clear that the robot was jumping so high when it fired that the axe was hitting the front bulkhead before hitting the opponent, wasted energy, this should hopefully stop that. the second difference is that there is now much more weight focused at the head, where you want it. Hopefully this means Hatchet packs a fair more whack this time around.

That's pretty much all from me for the time being, expect some updates as things start to progress, i'll leave you with some classic pretendo images and some of how Hatchet currently stands.

Cheers!