Update

So with the UK champs announced I figured I'd start early and try and get everything out the way in plenty of time.

Drumroll and Cicatrix had a little bash about last weekend, where one major thing became obvious. In a head-to-head with a wedge robot (that has a nice floor-hugging wedge) Drumroll would always ride up the wedge and the teeth wouldn't hit anything. In this instance it allowed Cicatrix to push me around the arena. I reckoned the only way to beat wedgyness is to join the club. Cue a few bits of metal placement and planning:



As much as I'd have loved to keep the gigantic triangles, they were a bit too big to be practical. So they were cut down to size and shaped, then everything got welded up. And voila:



Hopefully this will help against the likes of Tiny Toon and Cobalt etc. The sides are 3mm steel and the wedge is 6mm. Quite similar to TS2's wedge in shape and looks, which I noticed seemed to work well in both last year's champs and at the Robo Challenge Awards day. Added benefits include the fact that it ties the whole front of the chassis together. Previously I knew that if a horizontal caught the inside of the uprights, the whole drum mechanism would probably get ripped out (ala Hornet 2 at Rebel Robots) so I feel a bit happier about the front end now. Probably not completely NST proof but an improvement anyhow.

Also finally got round to tapping and bolting the ends of the drum shaft. It's been on my to-do list longer than I can remember but now that that's bolted in, it again just holds things together a lot better.

Despite all that, it's still quite underweight:



I still need to add a couple of 6mm steel squares to the polycarb cover to try and Cobalt-proof the ESC and receiver/lipo and add a belt guard (HDPE) but that will only add a couple of hundred grams. Gonna look at either some sort of angled steel on the front to try and deflect horizontals away from the bulkheads or just some 8mm-or-so HDPE to try and minimise any NST impacts.

Next in line for work is Carcinus which, at a completed weight of 9.3kg (seriously, how the hell?!) has plenty of weight spare for the Dead Metal-esque saw on top that was mentioned above
Mainly just the wiring to do on that. Could've done it this weekend but every time I looked at it, I couldn't be bothered. Need to get my mind in the wiring zone!