Once again, I pretty much rebuilt Backlash from the ground up. Here's the 'out with the old' picture.

I reconstructed the body with stronger and thicker armor, while slightly reducing the rear wedge length. (Yes, the wedge was still hollow).

There were several weaknesses that I discovered in Backlash that I wanted to improve upon. Here's the old shaft. Hmm, gotta use a stronger material...

Starting with a new baseplate again, I worked my way up. I built some new motor mounts to keep the EV Warrior drive motors from shifting. These simple mounts (hard to see here) were simply small triangles of aluminum welded to the baseplate and each motor was held in place by two heavy duty hose clamps. This setup worked quite well, I'd only need to tighten the clamps every other fight.

Most of the components were showing wear, so I replaced pretty much everything. Here's the new motor in place, ready for a chain to be installed.

By far the coolest upgrade to Backlash v4 was his new disc and teeth. I came up with the design on my computer. I wanted something to match the style I had done for the latest version of Nightmare. Here's my good friend Dan holding the disc after he finished CNC Machining it for me!

Awesome job, Dan! Thanks!

The disc, right off the mill, still showing all the milling marks before polishing and anodizing. Still very pretty!

Note the notches where the new teeth would be mounted.

Wow! Shiny! I chose to have the disc anodized. This was incredibly shiny! It almost seemed a shame to send this into battle!

The electronics of Backlash also went thru some revisions. I swapped out the drive batteries from NiCads to NiMh batteries. I also reconstructed all the battery packs from the stock RC car ones I used in version 3.

I kept the weapon batteries as NiCads, because they could provide the high current I needed to the weapon motor.

Since both Backlash and Nightmare were now utilizing NiCads and NiMh batteries, I had to make a nice charging cart for all 6 of the Astroflight 112D chargers!

I decided on a radically different style for the design of the front forks on Backlash. I designed these to provide good support vertically as well as helping to minimize Backlash's tilting problem when turning with the disc spinning. The triangular bases of each side had some bearing rollers in them to keep Backlash rolling across the floor both forward and while turning, without the use of a swivel caster.

The stability and drivability of Backlash was quite improved with these new front forks.

Here's Backlash at Season 3.0 of BattleBots. Read here to see how he did at the event! No big nut this time, but I sure had a blast!