Top Tests

[Rapidrory]

The rule of thumb I use when building for live events is "Would I be happy to hit this anywhere as hard as I can with a pic-axe?". If there's any part of the bot where the idea of hitting it really hard makes me wince, then it's not ready for combat A full sized pic-axe is also a good test for choosing armour materials from scraps; I used one to find that 20mm plywood and old 10mm polycarb are no good, but it won't pierce 2mm stainless (bends massively though).

Also, there's the classic drive train test of seeing if it can happily spin the wheels against a wall with someone stood on top; plenty of times you'll have the weight of another robot sat on top, so it's a good test of whether your drive train is up to the job.