Yesterday myself & Colin met up again, and did the usual Sunday stuff - building a robot!

The task that occupied most of the afternoon was strengthening the poles between the two halves of the scoop weapon up to the pivot point. The ones we did prior were somewhat thin metal, so we found some much thicker metal cut them to size and Colin bore holes into them.
Initially we started by Colin boring holes, and every so often he'd stop and oil up the area. However I suggested to speed up the process, we see if we had a suitable bottle or other item so instead of doing that, I can be stood aside and constantly oiling up the area to be cut. After a quick look around, Colin found an old school oil can, which seemed to speed up the process with me applying oil directly as needed whilst the drill was boring.
We did have a few issues with drills though, whilst giving the usual one a rest, we switched to one Colin acquired in a box of other stuff for the nice price of a few quid. We however found out why it cost this, after a few minutes of boring, it began to smoke - seemingly from the motor. However, it gave the usual one enough of a rest, so we went back to that. Although, after a while, that too also began to smoke. We ended up having to give that all a rest and went to ensuring the alignment of the scoop when it closed into each other, it wasn't quite doing that - but we improved that easily enough by increasing the height of the pivot point with some washers.
Thankfully, after giving the usual drill the sniff test and smelling nothing burnt out, and the drill functioning as expected afterwards, no damage was seemingly done by the drill smoking. As for the old few quid one, it was sparking internally around the motor too, so it seems the motor is in need of a rewind or replacing entirely.

By the end of the day, we had managed to finish the original task of increasing strength of poles, and after I left around 4pm Colin worked further on the weapon and unfortunately found that the last pole we had welded on was a little off, possibly as we may have rushed to attach that to be done for when I leave. Colin disconnected and re-attached that, and had the weapon now closing to an almost perfect cylinder - so that seems to be all that sorted.

Next week will probably be discussing and working on the method of closing / opening the weapon itself, or perhaps working on some teeth for the weapon to help grab and hold onto its victims.

Unfortunately, no photos were taken yesterday.