Team Death: 24 Hour Beetle

[team death]

I have been plagued by Thunder bugs while building the beetle weight today
which gave me a great idea for the name of the Robot.....THUNDER BUG .

It was Adams birthday this weekend so he was unavailable for the build
session so I set to on my own with orders to make a note of the building time.

I spent a couple of hours trying to reduce the weight of the chassis by drilling
lots of holes which is quite heavy steel, I then worked on the drive for the weapon
which is basically a drill hub mounting connected to the drive motor by a flexible
coupling and a hour was spent lining these up.

We had worked on the vex speed controllers last week and I decided to see how
the Robot so far performed with the wheels on.
After a quick solder job to the battery connections I was ready to try it out and
I was very pleased with the response-it was quick and the sticky wheels
worked a treat on the quite slippy surface.
Afterwards I decided to weigh the whole bot and it was 88 grams over weight
I'm confident we can shave off a few more grams by changing the rc battery
and more drilling ect.
DSCN2262.jpg
For the record 6 hours build time to add today