Drum selfie! It's what all the cool kids are doing these days (I sound so old).



Update

So as you can tell, I got my hands on that beautiful piece of engineering today. Didn't come until lunchtime though so in the morning I spent a bit of time ticking a few odd jobs off the list, such as drilling the holes for the link mount, starting to reassemble the drive motors and spare, and fitting the power LEDs. Same as last year but slightly different arrangement. Will kick out a fabby blue again:



Also received the correct boring head & toolset today so, after a quick Youtube tutorial on how to set up and adjust the equipment, I was able to make the brushless motor mount. It's a piece of 15mm thick ali from last year's chassis, hence the old drill holes & threads showing up:



But once the motor's mounted you don't see them, so it's all grand. I've seen a few folk machine similar mounts for their brushless motors to add a bit of support, but they tend to accommodate the taper on the front of Scorpion motors. Mine isn't quite as sophisticated but the motor is a mildly snug fit so hopefully it will be of some benefit:



The motor mounted in the robot, the pulley lining up with the groove in the drum tube. The reason for flipping the motor around like this compared to previous years was to, a) do away with the pulley on the drum, b) get the tooth on the far right closer to the bulkhead and, c) let me mount a bearing into the side bulkhead and support the far end of the brushless motor. Due to the positioning of the teeth though, there's quite a gap between the end of the motor can and the bulkhead, so I might leave that last task for now. If I've got enough time, I'll fit the bearing and extend the motor shaft but I haven't supported the end of my brushless for the past three years and not had any problems so will see how it goes.



With the drum and boring head having arrived I was also able to bore out the holes for the drum shaft to mount to. Was worried about things not lining up or drilling holes squint but seem to have fluked it well enough that it's straight and even. I was also worried about how heavy the drum would be, as it's 5.5mm wall stainless tubing with Hardox stuck on top, but when I chucked it on the scales, it was only a couple of hundred grams heavier than the old drum, so 2.3kg in total. I was maybe hoping for it to be a little heavier (Calculations? What are they?) but the reality is that it most likely saves me from having to mill the chassis to within an inch of its life to get it in weight.

So with that, once the drum was mounted I threw the whole bot on the scales:



Definitely not as bad as I was expecting. I'll claw a couple of hundred grams back when I trim down the front of the bulkheads to expose the drum some more, and can take a chunk out of the rear bulkhead to save some weight too. Accounting for various other fittings and such, I reckon that'll leave me 3kg for the armour. Not 100% sure what I'm going for in that respect yet but it won't be a full Hardox jacket anyway. Most likely a combination of steel and HDPE. But we'll see how that goes.

I'm back up the road tomorrow so that'll be the extent of the updates until next weekend.