First build thread.

[Ellis]

Hi.

About time I made one of these (it feels nice to be able to! ). I've had two 30a Electronize ESCs, a Planet 5 2.4ghz transmitter/reciever set and 4 drills for a while now. There's been some space opened up in my dads work schedule, making this weekend (day this thread was made) a good time to start putting something together.

We have loads of old iron. It's thick, very strong stuff, amazingly heavy, but since this first bot is just a great big full body hammer, I guess weight is a good thing! The iron is from window bars or rejas (Spanish name, I live in Spain), so it's designed to not let stuff get in, which is... Good! We didn't really plan all that much, y'know, we took a drill apart to see how small we could get the motor and gearbox, only to find 16 tiny ball bearings explode out of no where as soon as you unwittingly spin the motor axel, lol.

We looked at some of these rejas (like these things: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7BFcyqAQNOM/T ... +REJAS.jpg) and made up a chassis.
PROBLEM.
We don't know how to weld, we've had very little experience, I've had none to be honest, so we tried our best to weld some chassis up, they aren't pretty, and probably not very strong, but for our current purposes they should be fun, two side aluminium plates bolted onto the two sides of reja also help, it's strong enough to stand on, say.

We got a crude, but by the looks of things perfectly functional motor mount (just making the right size holes in the right places of the side wall) together, and got a motor on either side of the bot (we only had two wheels to hand). We found a small caster wheel and screwed it into a chunk of wood, and wedged it in the back of the robot with an offcut of the ali we had (it came from an old ladder haha). We had some half charged batteries (the ones that came with the drills) and we had a thread ona really badly grouted tiled floor. It's fast, and has crazy acceleration (I've never seen one of these before) and that was on half power with pretty much just one motor, the others battery was really quite low. Plus the caster was crap, and the floor was about as bad as you could hope for a caster that size.

Surprising how fast a 9kg chunk, well, 7 or so kg chunk of iron can move! Some pics below.

Beware! This has not been made pretty at all yet, all the welds are dodgy, the old paint of the rejas is dead, it's rusty, the way we got the ESCs and whatnot to sit on top is quite interesting, we made good use of a cardboard cake tray! So yes, don't expect the finished product to look anything like this.
you see the basic shape of the chassis and two motors roughly mounted.
from above, crudely mounted... everything!
not a very flattering angle

There are a few ways we can lose a bit of weight, we like the idea of some sort of lifter (Storm II style), but that's all after it works as we want it to and it looks nice.

WE NEED A NAME!

Edit: oops, kind of a huge wall of text, sorry about that! :shock:

Ellis

[typhoon_driver]

Very old skool. I like it. Best way to learn. All the principles you have there are merely refined for the various machines that are thrown into an arena.

[ady]

retrobot

[Ellis]

Haha, I like that. Oldschool eh? I like the ideas Oldskool or Retrobot as possible names.

[Ellis]

I think we'll be rebuilding the chassis, it's ridiculous, way over engineered, a car could drive over this thing quite comfortably lol. Plus it's far far heavier than it needs to be, the chassis with nothing in it weighs 5.4kg. We'd like to build something else, the same sort of size, allowing for a lifter mech, but not so quickly put together, the current chassis is silly.

Aluminium! An excuse to not have to weld!

Also, we spent a little time to get the back wheels on. We had a good thrash, but after just a minute or two the pram ( ) wheels gave up, they're made with some of the softest plastic I think I've ever seen, the bore (originally 9mm) got sliced away to almost 11mm lol!

Expect a far better chassis, hopefully not so dodgy and oldschool. Also, we're set on the name Mar-might, it's a bit of fun and unlikely to be taken.

[Ellis]

Just remembered I have an old RC boat, it's a beasty thing, but I'm only interested in the batteries, it has two 2100mah 7.2 Ni-Cd battery packs. I don't have the charger that came with the boat, has anyone got anything suitable?

They're also very light in comparison to the battery we were using, both weigh 600g or so, as against to over 2kgs!

[RogueTwoRobots]

Mar-might eh? Hmm, not sure if I love it or hate it

[calumco]

oh dear jamie! :P

[team_orr]

i like it, for a first robot it ain't half bad i suppose its 4wd? looks cool. bit big though, might be hard to drive?

[Ellis]

Lol Jamie!

And yes, it's huge, we made it that big because my dad, since it's unlikely we'll be getting to any comps any time soon, wanted to be able to stand on it and use as a form of skateboard. But since it's remote control, it's a bit of waste, if it were made to be like a skateboard it could just be a wired controller. Also, we're not so sure if the motors would take so much extra weight, we've ditched that idea pretty much and plan to build a segway (spelling?) instead.

So, we'll be making it largely out of aluminium, thick steel armour, and hopefully some form of lifter, we have an electric window motor which would be ideal to power a scissor jack (mangled and made useless, of cause ) to make a 4 bar lifter.