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Sunday, January 4, 2009

The 1,001st time is a charm !




I kicked it into overdrive this long weekend and got a lot accomplished with R2. All my major problems have been solved and it looks like I'll have a solid working droid for MegaCon.

The foot drives are working beautifully and LEVEL. At last !!! I modified the motor mounts by cutting a lot of excess aluminum off them and by creating completely new brackets for hanging the foot shells. These brackets are much better than the original sets. The parts were painted and the tapped holes in the motor mounts were reused. I initially made paper templates of the brackets and when they were right, I traced them over aluminum angle iron to fabricate new foot shell brackets.

The battery boxes are almost ready to install. I painted the blue on the battery box details and drilled holes for the hoses. The battery boxes were sanded and primed after a coat of glazing putty. PLUS ... now that the foot drives are finally done and the motors are in their final positions, I could fit the battery boxes and determine what to cut out of the back of them (to accommodate the motors). My friendly rotozip made short work of those battery box cutouts.

So after redoing all these parts, I charged R2's batteries, put him back together and then took him for a test drive in the street. This was the first time R2 was taken into the street. He needed to be tested to see if the battery power stayed steady and strong. After an hour of going up and down our street (a slight hill too), R2 was strong as ever and he made a lot of friends as neighbors and people driving by stopped to see him. So my original problem was a bad battery after all.

In a matter of 4 days all the major problems on my todo list have been erased and now there's just a couple dozen minor things to finish.

Time to grab a beer and kick back. Today was a major R2 build milestone and it feels great to not have those nagging problems bouncing around in my head.

2 comments:

Mike D. said...

Congrats Jim! Hard work finally pays off. It's always great to get to the point in a project when you've got all the major issues handled and you can concentrate on the fun & easy details.

Jim said...

Thanks Mike !