We had a pretty productive day yesterday, and temperatures were up, so we were hoping for an equally productive day today. As we were still waiting on some parts for the bigger 'bots we decided to spend some time on one of the beetles. Click Back after viewing an image.
Having cleaned up all the bolt holes in the top and bottom plates, we were able to think about putting some colour on the chassis parts. We taped up all the tapped holes and pulled out the paint shack.
A few squirts later and the parts have a nice - although slightly uneven - coating of matte black for the chassis parts.
After the paint had dried we pressed in a bunch of 5/16" and 1/4" bearings. We bevelled the holes with a countersink a touch and used the arbor press to insert the bearings.
We'd had some problems with the antweight so we decided to take a moment and test our connections. We'd soldered the bullet connectors to the weapon ESC, and hooked up one of our tiny Spektrum-clone receivers, wanting to make sure it fail-safed properly. Not only were our connections good - hurray - but the receiver fail-safed on all four channels, which was great!
Moving back to the chassis, we started bolting in pieces. The front wheel axle mounts were good and straight, and the axles we made over at Speedster Hobbies earlier this week fitted nicely on the motor shafts.
We originally planned on using a 1000mAh battery and had designed around that, but wound up ordering in-stock 850mAh packs, which had different dimensions. This meant that we had to cut a notch in the middle wall, which we did with Milly. As you can see the battery pack fits snugly. We've also drilled a hole for the weapon motor leads to pass back through to the ESC.
Happy that the battery fits snugly we've started assembling the chassis to test the fits of other parts. Here we've installed the outer walls and the weapon shaft.
At this point the weapon motor mount is in place, and we're focusing on the drive motor mounts. We've started thinking about the wheels, and we're not entirely sure how that's going to work, but we'll figure it out.
Although the weather is warmer, there's something happening out there because we have a heckuva headache. We decide to wrap up for the day, and throw all the parts we have on the scale. Without the front titanium plate or weapon blades we still have over a pound to spare, so no problems there. Time for Tylenol and a dark room ...
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