Hi all! I've been meaning to update here for a while and keep getting distracted. Seems I'm more organised when it comes to building the robot than I am at writing posts about it. Sadly that does NOT mean I'm very organised at building.

Since Robodojo is in less than a week, however, we've had to actually start doing some work on Wedgeley. We decided to go down the home-made linac route because really, how hard can that be? [Narrator's voice: actually quite hard].

This was a very rough mock up of the whole mechanism:



Or, in animated form:



(links because the forum still seems to be borked...)

The next step was to transfer this to a more substantial material. With that in mind, I tried my hand at CNC'ing a few parts:



This was reasonably successful although it took a while as I didn't really have a clue at the start. The key bit was getting the Argos motor to fit right, and that was OK:



If there's one thing I've learned from repeatedly binge-watching Scrapheap challenge, it's to NEVER EVER use chain drives for anything when you're bodging, so with that in mind here's the chain drive from the motor to the leadscrew for the linac:



Meanwhile, in a curious form of progress, Becky and Simon stripped down Wedgeley Mk I to the bare bones, to replace most of the panels, motor restraints, etc.. I am looking forward to a future where we make robots with MORE SPACE IN THEM.



Various internal changes have been made, slightly less badly fitted panels have been produced, and we now have some steel to clad the front of the wedge. The linac is mostly assembled now, so we just have to cobble together an upper jaw mechanism and the crusher (which will undoubtedly destroy exclusively itself if ever called upon to crush anything more substantial than a coke can) will be complete:



Thankfully I've got Friday off work next week, so we have TWO WHOLE DAYS LEFT to do that.

Cheers!