Or at least I try to.

This is not exactly designed to have any pleasure derived from it, its almost purely for my benefit, so if you are reading this, I assume you are me, in which case you probably need to buy milk and walk the dog. I find writing things down is an excellent way of problem solving, gaining inspiration and generally sorting things out outside the headbrain. My memory is extremely patchy at the best of times, and having a "public" place where my design and thought spam can be deposited may stop me solving the same problem over and over again and keep a vague order of my builds.

All right, onto my projects of late. The Beetleweight combat robot was going well until today, and even then it still had some problems. Main problem so far is the god awful weight distribution making the damn thing drive like some kind of horrifically impotent one legged puppy. Not good. having a 500g lump of titanium spinning 4000rpm may seem like a good idea for a weapon, and for a weapon it probably is. Its just that the 500g (probably closer to 7-800g once the motor/gearing are counted) is at one end of the robot.. and the motors are at the other. This of course leads to the drive not being all that great to say the least. Also adding to my drive related woes are the fact that one of the wheels is a couple of millimetres higher than the other! What the arse? How on earth did this happen; I put in extra super special effort to make sure the holes on both pieces were in the same place and I still got fucked over. If only I could CNC mill the bloody thing. Gradually filing down one of the front supports seems to be the only way to fix it, a weight on the back seems to push it down enough to drive okayish but that can't be done as I'm already on the limit. (a limit which has already been increased once... can haz 1.6kg now pls?)
Anyway, today's disaster was in me trying to weight reduce when tired. Using a large forstner bit I tried to hack out some grams from the HDPE front brace in a sort of ill fated mill emulation manoeuvre. To say this didn't work would be an understatement; it left the panel looking like the aftermath of some bizarre and deranged plastic surgery (sadly more or less what happened) But no big deal if it was ugly as all sin right, it didn't have to be seen by anybody? Wrong. Some complete tit had managed to mutilate the wrong side of the part, which would leave the horrible mess on the outside. I managed to bodge it and hope and it turned out okay.. its a little wonky and hole had to be re-drilled for its mounting but its more or less fine. This little bit of wonk however was enough to misalign my "carefully" drilled mounting holes for the rear armour of 3mm polycarbonate, so that had to be readjusted as well. I'm beginning to see why my drive might not be the best there ever was in spite of my care.

A bit of visual aid. You get how it fits together now, you can see the 10mm black HDPE part just behind the very nicely machined beater (17mm Ti) and the 3mm polycarbonate arse plate at the back. The wheel closest to you, the left hand side one is the one that is ever so slightly higher. Which makes me approximately all of the sad ever.
Well that will do for now, will probably post another thing fairly soon on this if there are any changes or developments.
Cheers, Haz.