January 2004

Saturday 3^rd January 2004

Now that I had the gas bottle tap sorted out, I decided to make a purpose built gas bottle spanner. I wanted a specific tool rather that a socket spanner so that I could paint it yellow and black, and it would stand out as a special robot tool in my toolkit. Lying about in the garage I found a suitable sized coach bolt, a few 19mm nuts, some steel, and the old gas bottle handle so was able to construct a special tool. The result of all my hard efforts is shown here.

Saturday 10^th January 2004

I thought it was about time I looked into fitting the magnet retention kit on the Hog's second Bosch motor before the Brighton Model world exhibition coming up in February. I bought the kit from Technobots, and found it was brilliant! I just followed the instructions and they fitted like a dream.

The magnets in the second motor had come loose so it was just as well that I was fitting the retention kit. The only problem I had was that the motor is a unidirectional motor, which means that the magnets are offset slightly. They can be fitted in one of three positions depending on which fixing slots you use for the magnet retention clips. I found that when I had put the magnets in that I had put them back with the wrong offset (!) and was then wondering how I would get the magnet pins out from the clips again. In the instructions they say to take the end of the motor off and tap them out from that end. Unfortunately I have welded up the end because they are only crimped together and are prone to coming loose.

In the end I cut a notch out of a piece of aluminium I had lying about, and used this to "hook" the pin out. It worked a treat and I was able to put the magnets back in their proper location before returning the motors back in the Hog.

I also replace a strut on one of the rear spikes that had been damaged during the battles at Worthing. My next tasks are to replace a few panels that became spiked on the Worthing arena.

Sunday 18th January 2004

I cut out three panels from my sheets of polypropylene; a side panel out of 12mm, the two rear panels out of 5mm. I then held them in the workmate while I heated them up with the paint stripping hot air gun before bending them to the Hog's contours. It was then a matter or drilling the fixing holes and painting them a glorious colour of Dulux pink before fitting them onto the Hog.