I downloaded your model and tried opening it in different modeling packages that supported 3ds. For my surprise, it appears all torn appart in 3dsmax, gmax, unwrap3d, milkshape3d and characterfx, but my surprise was even bigger when I loaded it into AC3d and loaded up perfectly. To be honest, before opening it in AC3d I thought it was a water tank, only then I saw the nice bot you modeled. From AC3d I exported it as an .x file, opened it with DX mview and re-saved it to .x
I definitely think it's incompatibilities in the 3ds file format. Try .x which seems to be the most optimised file format for Irrlicht.
brpaz, in your modeling application there will be a "center" of any object. This may not be what you, me or anyone else thinks as the center of the object. It is usually called the pivot point(3DS Max) and should be able to be adjusted. I do nto know how to use AC3D but in Max you can move this pivot point.
Now that does not mean that the model will still be at 0,0,0 when you load it in Irrlicht. In the modeling application you still much set your model to 0,0,0. NOTE: this location is from the pivot point not nessecarly what is thought of as the center of the model(it could be far far from it).
Irrlicht Version of February didn't use these and I don't know for sure, if it uses them by now. So, take care when modifing Pivot Points, they can mess your model up in Irrlicht.
But I hope, that these will be recognized in future versions of Irrlicht , if they are not supported by now, since they help modeling IMHO.
Or you could just move your model to be in the centre of the origin. 0,0,0 is loaded as whatever point you move the model to and every position in MAX is relative to the point that the model is on. I heard somewhere that modelling in the -ve is bad form but never seen an explination as to why this is so it's probably an old wives tale