Gearbox finished and nice new parts

Quite a large amount of work happened on the gearbox, and the prototype is mostly done. I learned a lot of stuff while working on it that make me more confident for making custom drive for my featherweight.

I always wanted to better support the end of the drive motors, although I've been lucky enough never to have problems in a robot because of this, it is an issue I would like to avoid. The fact that it looks cool as fuck and makes me look semi competent are total bonuses. In his infinite lathe wisdom, Ellis made me up some standoffs which attach the motor support plate. Picture credit goes to him as well.

Ellis and his family were good enough to put me up (and put up with me) for a week so some nice pulleys, standoffs and some epic weapon bars got made for me.  I had great time in truly wonderful company and got some brilliant parts too.

We visited a stock place... Wow. So much cool and useful shit is sold there: nylon, stainless, steel, brass and aluminium. Not super high grades but still. Cheap material. I bough some 50mm aluminium round (classing it as "Probably 5083") and 500mm of 80 x 10 flat aluminium bar and a 500mm length of 50mm black nylon for about 25 euros. Roughly 20 quid in real money.

I got Ellis to make me some hubs out of the nylon I bought from the stockist. He cleaned up the faces and then did the rest of the work in a mandrel. It is pretty incredible how he is able to get parts concentric and can consistently hit half thou tolerances on the worlds worst lathe.

Spaming pics I know but some lathe work will make a change from all the gimpy mill set-ups I insist on documenting. Apologies for phonepics and the odd orientations. I didn't think.

The swarf the nylon produced was horrible. I nicknamed this the weave of death. Seriously horrible stringy hairy stuff. The nylon seemed to finish nicely with a heavy enough cut.

My hubs all complete. Horrorshow. Nearly all perfect except the countersinking on one side of the bore because of some dirty chattery 3 flute countersink.

Because Ellis is hella legit, he took some sweet photos of everything that got made. Nylon hubs, some nylon antweight pulleys, 4 6082 aluminium beetleweight pulleys, some standoffs and 2 beautifully handmade bars.

Super cool stuff. The bars are seriously nice. The stainless bar to make them was literally only a few euros. I vaguely poked dimensions and got handed back a seriously nice bit of kit in return.

Some pictures of the hubs on the motors.

More interesting things will happen sooner or later. Got a passable drive and weapon solution drawn up for Massacre so I shall stick up progress on that when it happens.

Cheers.