Update

Ah, the toxic aroma of welding and grinding fumes! Spent most of today welding the endcaps into the drum and making a mount for the brushless motor. My welding's getting better but the angle grinder is currently still my favourite welding accessory

Anyway, got the new endcaps welded into place on the drum. Bolted the timing pulley onto it too and fitted it into the robot. Just the perfect width:



(excuse the lower quality photos, couldn't be bothered going back in to get my proper camera)
Spins much better and a lot more free than the old drum. Spent a bit of time trying to balance it too, and while I think I've made it better, I won't know for sure how good it is until I spin it up. But it seems pretty un-biased for now. With everything bolted/welded in place, the total weight is 2.35kg, which is a bit heavier than the previous assembly. Whether that will make much of a difference, again I won't know until I spin it up/fight it.
Once I've checked the balance, I'll give it a nice coat of paint and probably the spiral I had on the drum back at the 2009 tag champs.

Onto the brushless mount, I've probably went a little overkill with 5mm steel but nothing should be going anywhere!





So there's the main faceplate that bolts to the chassis, to which the brushless motor also bolts. Then, heeding the advice of others, I made up a rear plate to lend some support to the back of the motor. I haven't used a bearing here, just a couple of zinc shaft collets that I had (one welded to the plate, one on the shaft). Despite not being bearings, the shaft spins in them nice and smoothly, so it's enough to make me happy.
I thought about making the mount as entirely one piece - in a U-shape - to have it as one solid unit but I quickly realised that once the motor was in, there would've been no way to get it out. So that's why I opted to do it in two pieces. They need to get tidied up a bit (cut the corners off/down a bit and grind everything so it's all nice and clean) and then I'll get them primed and painted and that'll be another thing ticked off the list.

And finally, made a start on getting the outer armour and wedge back together again. The first step was to alter the design so that rather than having two side pieces that bolted on, it would be one single piece that wrapped around the whole robot. The back panel is all that's done so far:



It's the same 5mm mild steel as used in the brushless mount. Once the sides (4mm hardox) are welded on, I'll cut some pivot points for the rear wedge and weld them onto this back panel. Then hopefully the armour will actually protect the robot, as opposed to it falling off in almost every fight.

So that's that for a day. Should have more updates tomorrow, although not sure what I'll actually focus on, as Carcinus is at the stage of needing re-wired, which is tempting. Either way, at the current rate of progress I'll have both robots finished by mid-February, which will leave over a month for plenty of testing :twisted: