Team Health & Safety - First Time Builder

[Zenith]

NO BRAKES ON THIS TRAIN!

What a day.

Today I paid a visit to the lovely home and workshop of Mario and Babeth in Belgium, for the first time in 15 (!) years. I reckoned my need to make some sparks fly was as good an excuse as any to revisit the place where the foundation was laid for my robotics bug all those years ago.

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First, Mario showed me the ropes, and then we set to work as a team. I did the grinding, and Mario drilled the holes.

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I must say that doing all of this, time flew by at an alarmingly fast rate...

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...but the result was great. We tried bending the top lips of the small wedgelets upwards as well, but found that the titanium just sheared off. One of the sides also sheared as we bent it, but Mario welded that up in a jiffy.

Anyways, the result looked better than I'd have hoped.

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Especially the big wedge. After seeing the titanium shear with the small wedgelets, we chose to leave the top lips on the big wedge as they were.

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Coupled with the lifter this will give you an idea of what the end result will look like. All titanium will be painted, but I'm waiting with that until all electronics are in place. I'm doing that deliberately because I tend to be quite... aesthetically inclined, so I want to save that as a reward for when the bot is actually finished.

I weighed the entire thing with all the nuts and bolts required, and without the electronics it weights around 950g. It seems to me that I will have some wiggle room for extras once everything is in place.

Speaking of which, now that I FINALLY have a base plate I can put the rest of it where it belongs, and start doing the insides.

More on that in the coming week. Whooo!