With Mass Destruction coming up, I wanted to make a more effective robot than my previous derpy robots.
I’ve never been a fan of horizontal spinners because although they are generally able to store more energy (they can have bigger blades with ease), they seem to have difficulty imparting that energy in an opponent; instead they just bounce off opponents and spin away. Vertical spinners have the advantage of not being able to bounce away. Instead, some of the energy gets imparted through the frame of the robot into the ground, and the rest goes into sending the other robot flying into the air. The downside is that it’s a little more difficult to constrain the blade( gravity doesn’t help you in this case), and it’s more difficult to have larger blade sizes.
I opted for a combination drum spinner/vertical spinner mainly because I wanted to keep my weapon small and compact for ease of constraining/supporting it.
The central piece of the drum was a piece of 4130 tubing that I milled 4 slots in. The blades were some sort of hardened steel(scrap from MITERS) that press fit onto the tabs left from milling the slots in the drum.
The motor mounts were 3d printed abs and the top and bottom plate were waterjet polycarb and aluminum (respectively).
It worked alright in testing ( at the time it seemed amazing but I now have way more powerful robots) , but at it’s debut it had some very obvious and derpy flaws.
First of all, I was stilling using 2.007’s B0-P5 motors for drive. They worked great and have plenty of torque and speed but I found out, in my very first match, that the output shaft for the planetary gearbox is just press fit in. Whoops.
The weapon was pretty effective, actually breaking my opponents weapons, but drive failed hilariously every match and I was always counted out.
Overall win-loss record 0-3
Alex Hattori 