Team Riptide Birmingham Chronicles

[mrsam]

It's been a while since i last uploaded and with the beetle champs looming i felt it was about time.

You may remember last time i was talking about Atom, the beetleweight Atomic that wasn't a spinner, because i'd got bored of spinners. Well Atom is still very much a thing, but guess what i went and done? designed a new spinner, because that's sensible right?

I'll get to that in a minute, but first a little Atom update.

The first thing i did was to start on the huge steel wedge, suffice to say i will not attempt to replicate this ever again without a proper vice (i bent 3mm steel with a big set of pliers whilst the sheet was clamped to my kitchen counter, it sucked to do).

That's just after the bending, no filed edges yet. I was actually really happy with how it turned out even if it damn near killed me to do it.

With the edges filed and the lip sharpened, i also mounted it to the flipper arms with some m6 bolts and a nyloc the other side. I will countersink the head, i'm just lazy. Also note the 5mm polycarb baseplate.

Now i'll admit, i got lazy and forgot to take pictures of the rest of the build. So i'll fast forward to where it's currently at. The drive has been mounted, as has the lifter servo which has been tested and works rather well, does however need a bit of work to make it self right reliably, but i'll sort that soon.

A couple of pics of the servo and how it's mounted, nothing special. It's just a couple of hdpe mounts which are then bolted to a piece of 5mm polycarb, the servo horn will then be cable tied to the flipper arm so it can be retracted. Under the piece of polycarb sits the drive motors, esc's, rx and batteries.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed the little robot lurking in the background, that my friends is the replacement for Lynx, called err....Lynx!.

It's a drum bot, because i wanted a spinner, but not a mid cutter or a vertical disc/bar, there's already too many of those.

It's full of bodge and probably going to do terrible but then it's Lynx, so i won't be too surprised. The chassis is a mix of 20mm and 10mm hdpe, standard beetley drive of 1000rpm shadymotors, botbitz 10a esc's, 3s lipo, 28mm outrunner spinning the drum at 12K rpm fairly standard really.



The chassis as it stands currently, the wheel is too small but i didn't have any of the right size for a pretendo. Needs Moar drum though right?



^^

Drum things

It was made by Harry and all credit to him it looks amazing, i should have it in my possession in the next day or two along with the brushless set up to run it. Both robots will be a rush to finish as for the time being at least i'm somewhat unable to build stuff ( i broke fingers, it happens) but with a little help from my dad it should be just about doable.

I'll try and keep the updates regular as things should progress quickly.

Cheers

[suvv]

im looking forward to you keeping your streak going and atleast one of these exploding when a scottish bot hits it

[mrsam]

Scottish robot?

I think you're mistaken, Harry built the robot that wrote Lynx off

Some Scottish bloke just bought it off him

[daveimi]

Looks really good, thanks for putting up the picture about how the servo acts on the arm it gave me a lot of ideas.

[mrsam]

Haven't updated this in a while, i had planned on a big post Beetleweight Champs run down but, it was a flop for both Atom and Lynx, neither worked how they were supposed to. Atom has gone to a new home awaiting upgrades and Lynx has been given a complete rebuild and a new name to go along with it. May i introduce "Swag Demon"



It's Lynx, but built better, with more care, attention and i didn't build it in a rush. Hopefully the problems of the first version have gone from this one.

Now you may have noticed a familiar face in the last picture, that my friends is the new Hatchet (Hatchet 3 to be precise, #Howinthehellamionmythirdalready). I should note that mid 2015 i moved into my own flat, and as such lost almost all of the nice tools and workshop space that made me look like a half decent builder, i am now building with hand tools so stuff is now rough, very rough.

Anyway, Hatchet 3..

I liked Hatchet 2, it worked well (when the link stayed in) and it proved at the World champs that it can tussle with the big boys. Having said that, it had it's problems. It was tool tall, too big, the top armour was a joke and the axe whilst looking aggressive actually did very little in the way of damage. Through talks with other builders i've realized the reason for this is how the axe was made, it was strong as hell and very well made, but it had it's weight in all of the wrong places and as such wasn't making the most of the energy.

So i decided to start again, start from the ground and make my way up, keeping the good and getting rid of the not so good. The Electronic side of things, drive motors, esc's, batteries, weapon motor and weapon esc have all stayed, they worked well so i see no need to change them. The axe is gone and will be replaced with something that i feel should be better. Speaking of.....



This is my design for the new axe, taking inspiration from a few different places. It's going to be a single 10mm thick piece watercut from hardox 500. It weighs roughly the same as the old axe but there's a couple of major differences, 1) The kink in the axe arm inspired by a very well known Hammer bot, after watching back footage of Hatchet 2 it was clear that the robot was jumping so high when it fired that the axe was hitting the front bulkhead before hitting the opponent, wasted energy, this should hopefully stop that. the second difference is that there is now much more weight focused at the head, where you want it. Hopefully this means Hatchet packs a fair more whack this time around.

That's pretty much all from me for the time being, expect some updates as things start to progress, i'll leave you with some classic pretendo images and some of how Hatchet currently stands.

Cheers!