Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Weighing In

OK, what you see before you is the complete lower assembly (well I have my side plates off currently) of my B9. I am very proud of this. It was a lot of work (and money) to get to this point. But like the man said, a B9 is never truly finished until I say it is (ahem...or maybe the wife has a say in it???) Anyhow, I decided to put him on a scale. WOW ... what a surprise! From the waist down he was 300 lbs. For comparison, Mike Joyce's entire replica robot weighs in at approximately 275. That presents a huge problem for me.
With a projected weight of my robot now at over 400 lbs the current motors will not perform very well so that means I need to redesign the drive section with more powerful motors and that means just 1 thing ....... you guessed it, bigger; more powerful motors need bigger or more batteries. So I am changing the electrical system from a 12V system to a 24V system.

I will also have to redo the drive section and try to lighten all metal surfaces as much as possible. This will not be cheap....

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