Back to Ready for '02                                                                                                            Change of Rules

During the Easter break, we took Maximus back to visit his sponsors at B S & P.

Despite his stubborn refusal to run his flywheel, or to even drive properly on the warehouse floor, the day wasn't a total disaster.  Bill Mellish (with the striped tie above) saw that we had scope for improvement and suggested we change gear - literally!

The picture above shows the new proposed gear ratio which should give us a
higher torque at the cost of lower speeds.

Also, we will be replacing the castoring wheels with fixed wheels closer to the rear of the chassis.
The wheels will incorporate a vertical adjustment to compensate for different surfaces.

The wheels were trialled a week later, but had such a good grip that they resisted all attempts to turn Max. Worked brilliantly in a straight line - useless on corners!

We didn't quite have to back to the drawing board though! We went back to the spares box and retrieved the ball races which Andrew had brought in previously.  One of these was fitted to the rear of the chassis and gave us instant maneuverability, with a very low weight penalty.

The new gear wheels were fitted, taking about a week, and we found that the torque had improved considerably.  The loss of speed wasn't a problem, because Max still accelerated well.

Now, all we had to do was complete the pneumatic system, and we would be ready!

It was about this time that we received a copy of the 2002 rules from Mentorn, the Robot Wars organisers......

Here endeth this page