Featherweight Progress

With the beetle finished this morning, our list of things to do is diminishing quite nicely! But by far the longest To Do lists are for the the two biggest 'bots, and as there's only this weekend and next weekend left to go, we need to buckle down and make some progress! Hit Back after viewing an image.

We started out by bolting the drive motors and wheels to the baseplate. Somehow we messed up the CAD and the motors are an eighth of an inch out of place, which would make installing the side walls a bit tricky, but we press on ...

The front wall is UHMW which doesn't hold a thread very well, so we decided to insert square nuts to capture the bolts. After a bit of milling and drilling - note to selves: do that the other way around next time - the front wall is ready for a test fit.

And it fits quite snugly. We've deviated from the design in that we bolted the boom strengthener to the base without milling the base down, to try and maintain as much stiffness as possible.

A test fit of the top plate too - the nuts seem to work well, so we're happy with that.

Here we've installed the rear wall, and had to fight the wheel mount - because the motors are a touch too far forward the wheel is also slightly forward, and so there's interference from the wheel wall that makes spinning the wheel very tough. We're probably going to have to switch the half-inch wheel mounts for some 3/8" polycarb and re-make them.

The final shot of the day is a weigh-in. With all the components on the scale the 'bot is at 26.0 pounds, so we ought to have some weight left over for some additional stiffening of the weapon boom. Tomorrow we'll finish the walls, and get to work on wiring up the drive components. Given the issues we had trying to enlarge the 10mm bore on the bevel gear earlier this week, we're thinking of just ordering some 10mm keyed shaft from McMaster rather than fight with the gear on the lathe, so the weapon on the 'bot won't get finished until next weekend.