DIY Cardboard Battle Bots

After we had previewed "Emma Ren: Robot Engineer" by Jenny Lu back in April, I knew I had to figure out a way to bring battle bots into our home, but without spending a fortune on actual robot parts. I was browsing various robot kits when I came across a tutorial on Instructables for turning remote control cars into battle bots. The idea was to build a simple cardboard cover for the car then add weapons which would be used to pop a balloon on the opponent's car. Cardboard armor?! Ingenious! Popping balloons? Fantastic! And we even had a couple cars we could use so I didn't have to buy a single thing for this project. It couldn't be more perfect! 

We've had our cars for a couple of years so I can't find the exact same cars for sale but these two are pretty close (and budget-friendly). 

This car is similar to ours with the large yellow wheels. It has a tri-channel transmitter so you could have up to 3 of these cars racing or battling at the same time.

These cars have the 5th wheel which is pretty fun for stunt driving. I'm pretty sure if we tried to pop a wheelie while battling the armor would all fall off though. You can only race/battle two of these cars at the same time though (pay attention to the details so you don't get two cars on the same frequency - it says blue and red are the same frequency and need to be paired with black. The other colors list specific MHz). 

Anyway, on to building the battle bots!

For the 5-wheeler, I marked about where the antenna and 5th wheel were then cut holes. There's no perfect method here, start small and keep cutting the hole bigger until everything fits through. I also cut where the back wheels are since they come up high.

For the rock crawler, I flipped the truck upside down and gently pressed it into the center of the armor box so I could see where the little pegs on top lined up. You can see below where the pegs pushed into the cardboard. Then I marked where the antenna was and made holes using a screwdriver.

Here's what the armor looked like once I folded the boxes and hot glued them. 

 

I wanted the armor to come down more in the front and back to make it easier to attach the balloon as well as defenses/weapons so I glued an extra flap on both sides.

Then I gave the cars to the kids and set them loose. I let them each have two wooden skewers plus toothpicks for weapons and then whatever else they wanted from our crafting/tinkering supplies.