Scurrie Rebuild for Motorama 2008

With all the success we had at Franklin 2007 we decided to try to do this whole brushless thing in Scurrie. I splurged on the 'real-deal' brushless system in the 30 pounder, but the advent of the china-brushless tech coming out and the fact that Scurrie was always a budget bot meant that I got the cheap knock-off motor this time.

I settled on a BP Hobbies "store brand" outrunner. They don't sell the exact model anymore, but it was rated for 99oz planes so I figured it could probably move my 56 oz blade. I liked the belt setup I had in the 12 and the friction roller was working great so I stuck with that setup.

The drive motors held up remarkably well, but the frame layout was really crappy in the old version. For starters, there was no weight over the wheels so I couldn't get any traction. I also used C-Channel for the frame pieces to avoid tapping threads into metal but didn't realize that meant taking the thing apart with guts inside the bot would be nearly impossible. A while back I had seen a bot named DE Ripper use a thick UHMW frame with bolts going all the way through it an nuts on top. I had hit that bot with a full-forward strike from my 30 pounder and done next to no damage. I decided to try something like that with Scurrie.

I didn't take many pictures during the build, and it was a surprisingly fast one. Here is how the bot turned out:

I was pretty happy overall. The frame is easy to work with and replace, and if a bolt gets bent or stripped I can just pound it out and put another one in. I added the aluminum plate over the front to keep bots like Surgical Strike and Ingor from bashing the bearing block. Notice that I still have two battery systems and so there are two switches. One is a whyachi MS1 (totally overkill, but the MS05 wasn't out yet when I got it) and the other is just the battery plugs. Check out how this bot did at Motorama 2008.