Uplift Rebuild Part 3 – A new baseplate (and other miscellaneous small jobs)

17th March 2024

With the wheels now sorted, next on the list of things to upgrade from the original build was the baseplate. This is currently a sheet of 5mm thick HDPE which is far too flexible and will not provide enough protection for things like the battery.

Back in 2017 when I was planning on adding an electric axe the idea was that all the components would mount to a solid frame, constructed out of either 15mm or 20mm thick HDPE. The baseplate would therefore not be structurally important, hence the decision at that time to go with 5mm.

The reimagined 2024 version of Uplift however will require many components to be mounted to the baseplate, and really the battery needs to be covered by at least 10mm on all sides anyway.

Obviously going to 10mm for the baseplate would be much heavier and although I was reasonably confident I had the weight to spare, I cut a couple of 10mm sheets (one for the top lid as well) to roughly the right size and threw them, along with the robot and all the components I knew I’d be using at this point, onto the scales:

As you can see, it came to 12.14kg which was very close to where I wanted it to be at this stage of the build.

To get the baseplate the correct size and drill the mounting holes in the right places, I simply clamped the old 5mm baseplate to the 10mm sheet and used that as a template. Cutting HDPE with a jigsaw is one of my least favourite jobs but aside from a slight slip up on the front edge (fortunately where nobody is going to see it) this worked well:

Even the mounting holes came out in the right places and I got the new baseplate attached to the robot with no trouble whatsoever:

The 10mm is definitely far more rigid. I’ll add some additional mounting holes down the line as it is currently only held on by two bolts along each side. I want to double that and add a couple at the front and back too.

I finished off the weekend by servicing my CNC router. It hasn’t really seen much use since 2019 and needed a bit of attention.

Next up on the robot to-do list is to have a go at some sort of lifting arm, something which I’ll be making heavy use of the CNC to accomplish.