We'd like to give a huge shout of "Thanks" to Chris and Mike Allison over at Speedster Hobbies. For starters, Chris and Mike are fun to hang out with, and they also have a clay race track at their store, and it's fun to watch the R/C cars go running up the wall feature. They also have - hidden away in the warehouse - a lathe, and graciously agreed to let us use it, which we most certainly did! Thanks Chris and Mike for helping us fabricate some very important pieces! Click Back after viewing an image.
Here's the beast - a nice 7x20-ish lathe, with three-jaw chuck, and all the accompaniments for getting some boring and facing done. After a quick overview, we were left to get it on!
And get it on we did! Boring the 3" Colsons and the weapon pulleys in no time. Unfortunately the chuck was a touch too small for the 4" Colsons, so we'll hack those later, but we were getting through our checklist of things to do pretty swiftly!
The 15-tooth rear drive sprockets put up a bit of a fight, but we finally bored them to a half-inch, and also bored out the drive axles so we could thread them later to mate with the Handiworks drive motors.
As we were contemplating chucking up the weapon drum to turn it to the right length, Chris pointed out another piece of equipment with a subtle cough - a bandsaw! It's a fancy one, with the ability to repeat parts using a hydraulic mechnism to move material along the blade.
So with a good helping of country-style gravy (cutting fluid really) we set it to work on the drum - which took not much more than a minute and a couple of pints of orange ooze to trim down perfectly.
We'd like to thank Chris and Mike again, and after picking up a power supply and LiPo charge sack from their store, we headed back to base, promising to bring the completed 'bot by to challenge one of their racers show off a little bit once it was running. Thanks guys!
Back at the Build Space, we bolted a weapon pulley to the polycarb end-cap, and tested the fit. The dead weapon axle had been turned down a little at Speedster Hobbies, and everything seems to roll very nicely!
We hooked up one of our battery chargers to the power supply and verified everything beeped - we haven't read the charger manual yet, so have no idea how to actually make it charge a pack, but one thing at a time :-) We also fitted Anderson PowerPoles to the charger, rather than the aligator clips it came with.
For some reason, our paint job from last night came out with a bit of a texture to it. Odd. But we pressed in the bushings for the drive axle, and moved on.
Time for a lick of paint for the inner rails and back plate. We'd taped over the threaded holes for convenience - not wanting to have to clear the paint out of the threads later.
Here's where we wrapped up for the day before cleaning up for dinner - the drive axles have been threaded for the 3/8-24 shafts on the Handiworks. We're not best pleased with them ... they're not totally straight, so we may turn them around and re-thread the other end and try to get them to run truer.
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