After a brief rest, we got straight back into the workshop to do some more updates to Hot Pants. We spent some time actually upgrading the garage to make it a better place to work (electricity, lighting, that sort of thing!) and then analysed what issues we had to deal with.

We started by upgrading the drive system. New pulleys on the motors which fit the belts much better, giving less slip and a bit more power. We had to order new pulleys from HPC Gears, only to discover that I'd measured the wrong part of the shaft and that they needed a larger bore. Our friend Peter helped us out of that one!!

While we were waiting for the pulleys to arrive, we decided to implement something I've been thinking about for a while - a target laser. We built a mount out of polypropylene on the side of the roll cage. This contains a 1mW laser which is remotely controlled using a Team Delta RCE110 switch. The tests have been pretty good - if the laser is on an object, I can hit it! Simple. Its yet to be tried in the heat of battle, but tests look pretty good.

We then made a new mounting for the axe. The older system was pretty much just an axle through the shaft. This kept warping and bending. The new system is a holding 'cup' which has the shaft sits in, with the axe welded to it. Holds the axe much more stiffly in place.

The final thing is the speed controllers. These had become very wobbly and didn't dissipate the heat properly. We removed the heat sinks and drilled them out to M6 mounts. Lots of lovely sticky heat sink compound and its all much tighter now.…