Relocation, application and determination

We pick up this tale as we venture into the dark depths of October in northern Scotland. Cold all round, therefore perfectly acclimatising us for the Robot Wars warehouse!

I say northern Scotland (for reference, my workshop is in south-west Scotland) because I relocated the robot, several boxes worth of tools and accessories, and all the spare parts and materials to Gary's workshop. Time was marching on and with me moving onto a winter shift timetable at work in Aberdeen, there were barely any weekends I could head down the road to work on the robot. Gary graciously offered me the use of his workshop in the run up to filming, making it a much shorter distance to travel to work on the robot on odd days off here and there. We categorically wouldn't have been able to complete Coyote on time had it not been for this, so I can't thank Gary and Sarah enough for their hospitality during this time!

So, by this point in proceedings, Series 2 had been confirmed and applications were open! This is the photo of Coyote I included in the application:

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It's obviously far from completion, so in order to give the production team a rough idea of how it would/should look when finished, I attempted a CAD/MS Paint/Photoshop crossover. Emphasis on the 'attempted'

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As I already had a Matilda-esque chainsaw, I decided to try and incorporate some other small house bot elements, so the back was to feature spikes like Dead Metal (representing the hackles of the coyote as it's preparing for a fight) and a small copper exhaust stack reminiscent of Shunt. The copper was to try and help style the machine in a steampunk theme, plus I work with copper in my day job as a gas engineer and wanted to have something that I could tie into the robot from work. Anything that could make our application more appealing.

On that note, for anyone looking to apply for future series, along with the above pictures I also included a video cut together featuring clips of the robot driving and the jaws working (separate clips as they both weren't working together at this point) as well as explaining in real time what was planned for the robot in terms of armour and looks. We also tried to make the application fun; bombarding them with generic stats in a serious tone will get repetitive for the production team when they've got hundreds of applications to sift through, so keeping it light but informative can help your chances of being noticed.

With the application in, we needed to get cracking. We wouldn't hear for a couple of weeks whether we'd been accepted or not, but we couldn't hang around twiddling our thumbs until then. The first port of call was to deal with the internal components. Coyote's main chassis is incredibly small, 410mm x 265mm (some featherweights are larger), and we had to fit in two drive motors, a battery, a linear actuator for the chainsaw, various wiring gubbins and no less than six speed controllers! Five brushed (two weapon actuators, two drive motors, one chainsaw actuator) and a brushless (chainsaw spin). Thankfully the majority of the controllers were compact and/or low profile, which reduced the headache slightly.

The biggest single component after the drive motors was the battery, so installing that first would determine how much and what space we would have for the other components. We opted for a single Optipower UAV lipo pack to power the whole machine; a 22.2V/6S, 8000mAh pack. I made a simple HDPE retainer and the battery fitted perfectly with padding:

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The motors pictured are just cans from Bosch 400s. The innards were sent off to be rewound for 24V, however it took ages for the job to get done and we ended up having to buy some second hand Bosch 750s further down the line to substitute for them in order to let us test and tweak the drive as necessary. Speaking of the drive, the motors were to be controlled by a pair of Victor 883 controllers. I've long since dispensed with the fans that come with this range of speed controllers as the fan blades always break in battle and become useless. Removing the fans leaves a low profile speed controller, which meant that they fitted perfectly on a plate which doubled up as the battery cover:

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The space between the motors was earmarked for the chainsaw actuator, so that left the gap on the left hand side free for the brushless ESC and three TZ-85s for the actuators, as well as the radio receivers, any power distribution bars, wires and a possible link location. Thankfully the TZ-85 controllers are easily mounted in any orientation, so I stacked them all side by side next to the brushless ESC and clamped them all down. As a speed controller unit it was solid, but I wanted a bit of give when they were installed in the robot to prevent shock damage, so the plate was located on some M6 threaded rod with springs to allow for bounce:

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Below is the chassis with all the main parts bar the chainsaw actuator in. Very compact as mentioned, but workable. The chassis also needed some beefing up for heavyweight combat, so you can see a couple of pieces of steel angle welded to the base and 8mm aluminium plates cut for the back. This would not be the outer back armour so we could get away with ali. The front of the chassis would also need a steel plate welded on so that the jaw assembly could bolt to the chassis:

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By this point we'd received confirmation that we had been accepted onto the show and production had been in touch to arrange our VT.

For those interested in what's involved, for ours we had Joe (camera) and Sam (sound) arrive at about 9.30am. They set about making the workshop suitable for filming, which involved blacking out the windows and door, bringing in various artificial lighting, setting up the camera and deciding what colour filters to use to match the robot (orangy brown for us). They also used a smoke machine for added effect. The day began with them interviewing me, asking about general details, day job, the why and how of the robot and getting some soundbites. They then swapped us around and did some more interviewing, this time with Rachel. Once they were happy with that, they filmed us working on various bits of the robot, shots of welding, grinding, soldering etc, then did our hero shots where we pose with power tools while trying to look intimidating. The last part involved getting clips of the robot working as much as possible. We still had no drive motor internals so we rigged up the jaws to operate and ran them up and down several times while they filmed from different angles. This led to a great shot in the edited VT from the episode where the jaws opened and they overlayed the sound of a dinosaur roar, which looked really cool. We also 'crushed' a spare go-kart wheel that was lying about which again made it into the edit. Sam then needed to get back into Aberdeen to get a train home so everything was wrapped up nicely by about 3.15pm. Several hours spent for a 30 second snippet in the episode but it's good fun to do!

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So concludes today's chapter. Tune in next time as things start to get frantic with only three weeks to go!