KLAUS-293: A Weird Little Beetleweight Shuffler

Bonjour everyone, you remember Klaus?

Well it’s been so long I wouldn’t begrudge you if you had. It was a 4wd “hammer” “saw” with both of those words being used very generously. Ultimately it was one of more successful endeavours. Don’t get me wrong it still lost all its fights but it was a huge bucket of techniques I still use to this day. It was the catalyst for printing nylon chassis parts, for casting polyurethane tyres and generally having big silly fun. 

The squat,  power dense 4wd platform was very promising at being a simple and reliable machine with a few minor tweaks to the weapon system. Naturally it got abandoned for over a year then  rejigged as an overhead saw with tracks. 

My genius and tendency for self sabotage knows no bounds. To be completely fair, the thoughts originated for a newer MotherLoader but the potential for violence and the weapon style put it firmly into Klaus territory. It got close to being completed but never really clicked together to be a fully cohesive project for me. I’m super interested in revisiting this as I have done a lot of the legwork and have the parts.

Very recently I was cleaning out some boxes and found some old discs I had cut for a jolly - years back when I did such things. I think I was trying to emulate the VDD styles from the mid 00's that I really liked. 3 teeth, while lacking the bite of single tooth (hey, about a third as effective funnily enough!) they are great for looking cool and they let you stack a phenomenal MOI into a disc. These are 8mm thick and I feel the tooth profile is both aggressive and attractive. With these chunky nuggets in hand the brain juices really started flowing and before I knew it I had built:

KLAUS-293

Now I am not a huge fan of the spinner game anymore. I try to not come across holier than thou about it because I genuinely don’t think it’s wrong to build what you want. That’s kinda my whole deal. I make a few limp wristed snippy comments at the BattleBots level events and competitors where things morph unhindered into 4wd verts like an even more unsettling form of carcinisation. I try and wear my bias on my sleeve a little and not mask my intentions with fluff. This version of Klaus is my way of dipping a toe in while retaining my dippy little quirks. 

Anyway, I made two verts. As I’ve enjoyed phrasing so far “does this mean I’m trying twice as hard or only tryharding half as much?” Answers on a double sided postcard.

Now I started not a million miles away from where I ended up. I wanted to transplant existing parts into this robot and ideally not buy anything as that’s a revolving door of menace for me. My initial inspiration was dual spinners inline and up front like the old American robot “Village Idiot” but I couldn’t really get the idea to stick with me right now. It's something I'm really keen to explore at some point as I just adore the profile. 

God damn I love America from 1997-2007... well the robotics side at least...

I’m a very simple man with very clear sets of inspirations - Stance Stance Revolution is one (which itself comes from Counter Revolution. My word, it’s like poetry - it rhymes!) I was also tentatively inspired by Sunstroke, a dual disc horizontal that blew the backside out of Dear Mr Nips a couple months back.

Here was the first serious draft. The drive and proposed electronic system was transplanted from MotherLoader with the bluecap 25mm’s and a BBB dual esc. The tracks were from the overhead saw version of Klaus and the central motor was a 3538(?) NTM which was a veritable monster but was 1800kv. It was heavy, powerful and fast. Honestly before I got too bogged down in weight (spoiler alert) the speed was the killer as I was so limited on how small I could make the drive pulley.

To get the tip speed under the 250mph limits the driven pulley on the disc had to be enormous. This was a bit of a naff design as it just meant they are both heavy and a massive target!

I got to the point where I had made a bunch of revisions with the chassis. My new style of design is an initial sketch where I then derive every part from. It makes sweeping changes very easy and its a practice I need to keep going for sure. This lad is the first TPU frame I printed and you’ll notice the drive got a distinct upgrade too.

Width is weight and I was on a campaign to get this monstrosity as small as possible. The RB MARS are an amazing off the shelf solution. I bought a pair on launch but never had anything that would benefit until right now! In a typical turn of events about a week after I finally glopped these cracking little units into a robot Ranglebox goes on hiatus! At least these are bulletproof enough not to really need spares too often. 

I also reneged on my “don’t buy anything” ethos and spend a whooping £12 on a 3530. This was a smaller, weaker and slower motor but that actually benefited me. I could power it properly from a beetle sized pack, I didn’t have to panic too much about ESC’s and the lower KV meant I could shrink the driven pulley down to much less of a weakness.

This was the moment I had got everything I wanted to into the robot and made the foolish mistake of plopping it on the scales.

1498g wow! Nice! 2 grams to spare!

What was decidedly less nice was I had to fit two lids, one 8mm shaft, a dozen bolts and screws, a weapon ESC and a switch into those two grams. Oh gee! How absolutely dreadful!  That was what we in the trade call a big fucking problem. It had all the makings of being jolly bloody difficult to sort out! Theatrics aside, in all honesty it probably could be done with enough flesh cutting and titanium shafting, component swapping but that all started to look like either an expense, a compromise or an expensive compromise.

Luckily, because I am a slave to the whims of inspiration and generally completely awful I already have solved this problem. I had made several test beds to service an enormous horizontal that had a kilo of spinning mass and so had a lot of the necessary hardware to entertain an adhoc shuffler refit. See Ma, buyin' all them Chinese bearin's was worth it!

This was a little 3 cam offset leg that was really pretty low profile. There’s something exceptionally pleasing about 120deg spacing on this. Made really simple by the hex hub. I wanted my motion to be as smooth as possible and to properly fill out the space intended for the tracks I could fit 4 cams and 4 legs. Just working off the completely arbitrary premise that more legs equals a smoother ride. Mental simulations (daydreaming) said it would work. 

There! You’d almost think I designed it like that. It was a really good fit for the first draft and the leg design didn’t actually change too much from #1

You can see how close it all is here. This is a 2mm offset on the cam which just rolls the leg profile around the space left for the track clearance. 

With the PLA trials done I added in my geometry to cast the tread around and hit print! These were done in the same TPU as the chassis and were an abject failure. Way too soft and flexible - they looked the part though. I quickly reprinted them in nylon. The bearings are a really tight fit, but there are also screw holes around the bore with the idea you can use a flanged head as a mechanical retainer.

The ‘timing’ of the legs is done with the help of a 6mm MARS hub from Ranglebox. The 2x offset cams are through bolted together and put at their 90 degree spacing using the hub. The driven cams are just pinned together mirroring the driven ones. The bearings are 25*32*4mm and there’s a lot of them. Gobless AliExpress. 

The driven cams run on Ranglebox nylon bushings - this works better than expected. I was stopped from using ball bearings by the PCD of any sensible screw pattern. I could use a needle roller but that’s expense that seems to not be completely essential for the moment. This is actually pretty fiddly to assemble the first time but it is okay to service if you make sure you remove it from the robot as one unit and don't immediately drop it. I can guarantee that is exactly what I will do when I'm in the pits under pressure however. 

It’s a bit annoying but all 4 cams are unique - with that old style 3cam it was one part replicated. If I wasn’t retrofitting it I think it could go down to 2 or 3 parts.

I copied the model of the leg with the very moustache-y foot profile and just patterned them out in a shallow tray. I added some corner rads to make the silicone a little easier to remove and just printed it in one shot.

It wouldn’t be a Harry Post without a completely needless slab of silicone. I can’t help it, I just think they’re neat! With the silicone negative made I could then slot my legs in place and carefully pump them with 50a polyurethane and a smidgeon of orange pigment. It is a Klaus build after all!

This is the smallest and most delicate thing I’ve moulded and it’s the most stressful, difficult and wasteful. Because I only really need 2.5g of rubber per foot I don’t technically need that much but I’m making 100% extra just so I can get it into the syringe. You can’t reasonably pour these moulds either. The technique is to gently fill them with a syringe, backfilling them via the through holes in the leg. It’s satisfying watching vibrant orange bloom through the shape but not easy if you have the sausage fingers of a particularly dense Neanderthal and the dexterity to match.

And that brings us to the collection of ginger false moustaches that make up the shuffling element of the robot. You can see a rough test of the movement in this video

Unfortunately it's in Shorts format because I am a morally bankrupt slave to the online validation of strangers. Plus it marries up to my Boomeristic tendency to film in portrait. #content

So you can see here now relatively tight the mechanism sits in reality. You may call it an insulting lack of clearance but I say it’s an interesting and effective filling of usable space. The flanges are just ABS and with the M3 bolts running all the way through they keep the legs retained. There is a plate of armour that bolts to the chassis through the screw inserts.  

A closer shot of the rest of the robot coming together. It has these TPU forks that are fractionally pressed into the ground by the elasticity of the material so that any frantic jiggling by the locomotion doesn’t pull them off the floor. This also shows the addition of the nylon brace which is there to make the robot look like an old bridge (please, call me Isambard Kingdom Hills) and more importantly stop the flexible nature of TPU from causing immediate and catastrophic damage the second it hits anything.

In case you needed some scale for Klaus-293 it’s much larger than a 50 pence piece but only slightly larger than Nips, sharing almost exactly the same footprint. Very different and incompatible vibes however. Nightmare blunt rotation. 

Again, it just wouldn’t be me if there wasn’t an element of dyeing my fingertips a funny colour, alongside some nylon as a by-product.

The pulley and hub interlock with the spokes of the disc which means that the bolts (only 3*M4) aren’t taking all the shear load and it really helps from a quick alignment perspective. Does mean I'm slightly putting plastic nubs in shear along the layer lines but hey, don't think too hard about that - I sure didn't! 

The assembly isn’t the sexiest or most interesting of affairs truth be told but it’s sort of an attempt at best practices within less than ideal constraints. There are two 8mm bearings, spaced out as far as possible but still having proper thrust bearings. They will run on a shoulder bolt that I can just torque the assembly down and get a really solid install. I had the ball bearings on hand but I had to splash out and grab the needle thrust washers. Strangely Amazon was the cheapest and easiest. What a depressing world we live in. I naturally sold my soul and spat on my principles for £4.79 and next day shipping. 

Minus a gram or two for bolts that are the right length and that’s still a chunk of change for a weapon - and I’ve got two of em!

Now for the more eagle eyed readers, you may have noticed that both the discs are traditionally vertical. By which I mean they both spin upward in an uppercutting motion. This sort of makes the most sense to do but I have achieved this in a pretty horrible yet amusing way. I could have been clever and used additional pulleys or a gear driven drum to reverse the direction of one of the discs or just simply run one spinning down (& had a neat way of telling which end was the front!) but instead I decided to look back 100 years and pretend my robot was an overhead shaft driven factory. 

Hey, it's only a little bit shitty. Maybe a lot come to think of it. But it doesn't not work. Twisted belts are actually pretty common, though normally they are purpose engineered flat belts or timing belts so you don't have a harsh intersection like with these polyurethane round belts and they're normally over a much more generous distance but....this has a working lifespan measurable in minutes. And that's being exceedingly optimistic. 

Lil diagram to really hammer home the point and show how it should be done. I guess it's pretty self evident but I couldn't not reference a site called "Harry's Old Engine" which has a gorgeous amount of actual engineering and theory. The kind of stuff I enjoy consuming but seem to dance around implementing because I am a filthy hack fraud. 

I know, I know, test box, bad example, somebody will lose a finger.  There's a reason I have posted the short blipping of the throttle as an imbedded gif on a blog nobody reads. All the cool, impressionable children are off watching NHRL explosion clips on Tick Tock or whatever it is they do. Anyway this highlights the motion component of the discs which was all I really wanted to show. 

So that’s the guts of this little nugget. Reuse, recycle and so on. Some very well loved BBB brushless escs and a £3 genuine Bottom of the Barrel Borshless (different type of BBB) plane style ESC. Back in the day before drones ruled the skies, phat mosfet spammed plane escs were a completely legitimate way of controlling motors. Too dumb not to work is the theory I’m working on here.

Here it has been chopped and glopped together with a liberal application of heat shrink, zipties and several warcrimes against electrical engineering. It's nothing too exciting, the worst thing I did was backbreaking the capacitors and forcing them to sit upright. Good posture is paramount for efficient electronics. This bulk could be the fraction of the size but getting a proper or even smart ESC with programming options would have cost money. If it dies I have one complete unit as a spare and when that immolates I'll go spend more than £3 on electronics. 

Well, there we have it. Some work still to go on, mostly detail oriented and tightening and testing but it’s all together. Not bad for a little low effort side quest to get me away from building real robots. I have picked up a few useful pointers with this build. Mostly tips and tricks for large TPU chassis blocks which I think is a good way to live my life going forward. It's so lazy but it feels so strong. 

As stomach churning as it is to publicly state your own pride in a build I’m genuinely really happy with ole Klumpy here. It was a nice refresher into a lot of old habits and I can still try and trick myself into thinking I have an artistic flair. ( That’s ARTistic, people) For those wondering where the numerical component came from it's deceptively simple and highlights another niche interest of mine. Hm, maybe artistic was the wrong word after all. 

It stems from the absoultely incredible chunk of engineering might, Bagger 293. Much like MotherLoader-T34 aped the clunky, simple nature of its Soviet namesake I tried to get some of the awe and structure of heavy German engineering into a little plastic clatterbox. 

There’s still a lot of weight to play with so I’m guessing I’ll start beefing the lids and the side armour as a start but I’m kind of happy just to let it ride.

speaking of letting things ride

Sometimes it's not making noise? Excellent. Yes, for a small thing it creates a generous amount of noise pollution and with forward motion strictly as a secondary concern. I can properly get to grips with it when I get my transmitter back and can actually have the drive mixed to single stick. Right here and now I am doing my best with a pistol grip GT5 by pulling the trigger and turning the wheel at the same time. Flawless control I assure you. I have a tinymixer I could add in but I'd have to take it out when my i6 stops being bandied about by Yodel. 

Now comes the question what do I actually do with this lump? I am dead set on Hard Nips being the next robot I compete with so it’s sort of going to get relegated to whiteboards which I don’t think is fair for this sort of robot. Already at a mobility disadvantage I feel it could hold it’s own in a 3 way melee but not against anything more serious. Just have to wait and see what the calendar looks like for the year and hope to get it wiggling it’s way out to something!

KLAUS-293

Weapon: Dual vertical spinner. 770g split over 2x 8mm hardox discs with a 238mph tip speed
Weapon Motor: Generic 3530 brushless motor 1100kv 
Drive:2x Ranglebox MARS gearmotors powering a simple 4 leg cam based shuffler mechanism 
Electronics: 2x BBB brushless drive ESC's, unbranded "40a" brushless plane style ESC & 4ch RX with a Fingertech switch (2.5mm UK compliant hex key) 
Battery: 650mah 4S lipo 
Chassis: 3d printed generic TPU with eSun Nylon used for pulleys, shuffler legs and chassis bracing. ABS and HDPE also used. 

The Slightly Depressing and Boring Tale of MotherLoader T-34

 MotherLoader Is Dead. Long Live MotherLoader!

This is a chronicling of the last of the Loaders. I am pretty sure that the prior version with the dual weapons is undocumented on here but it has a decent showing on FaceBark and the BBB forum so I'll leave sleeping dogs lie as too much time has passed. To be fair, the same could be said about this version as it's over a year old since it was built, fought and forgotten but as of Feb '25 I have pulled it out to have a look over so to keep things fresh I'm plastering the build up here too. 

It's mostly ripped from my BBB forum post so if you've read that chances are you're unfortunately familiar with my musings. 

The old was gutted and the corpse paraded in front of the prototype of a new. 

It looks quite simple all spread out and I’m inclined to make it simpler. I’ve fallen out of love with the little forklets and will change these out for a moderately sweaty single fork in the centre of the wedge. I planned to beef up the wedge to about 10mm too just to continue with the tanky theme. The lifter will be jettisoned for ease too.

MotherLoader T34 will be a quick and dirty rework with the aim of getting something ready for BBB in February 2024. Brutal and simple. And yellow.

Progress on ML-T34 is going well as it doesn’t actually need much designing. Things are mounted where is most convenient for them and I have given up the battle on trying to compact and condense as I feel it is often a detriment to function. This robot will be wide and ugly. This robot will work. Confidence! We love it.

The drive required no modification to type. It still retains the 32DP RC car pinions driving a spur gear built into the driver pulley. There are simply two of them now. Oh and they’re brushed. Klaus was phenomenal to drive and the amounts of brutal power on tap were exactly what I wanted. The speed of Klaus was a problem but this is less of an issue as I am running a smaller effective wheel diameter and there is an additional reduction slapped on there too. Torque city, Population: Me. The pulleys are nylon, the gears are 7075 alu and the bulkhead has been sloppily test printed in ABS for now before committing to nylon.

This is the finalised but unfinished weapon system. While looking super similar it has been almost completely retooled with lots of quality of life and tying up of engineering loose ends. The most obvious difference is with the weapon motors. There are simply two of them now. Still a Nerf mod motor shoehorned into a 22mm rotolink planetary gearbox but now it has a twin. I figured it adds a little more redundancy and doubles the power (funny how that works) The axe self righted wonderfully but it will be borderline lifter territory now. Maybe some hook and grab attachments are dancing, mockingly, just beyond the horizon.

There is no longer a big combo gear as it was a massive weak point. Simple but horrible to change out and work on. Also the first stage which is only MOD1 was distorting in nylon and straight up detonating in PLA-ST. Instead it is going to a metal gear - I have a hardened 40t RC car pinion which is potentially overkill and heavy. If I can’t lighten it I will change out to a 7075 aluminium one. The benefit of using an RC pinion is the 5mm bore which means I can just switch the whole transmission over to a live shaft, running a length of silversteel through bearings in the bulkhead. Hot swapping gears has just become incredibly simple.

The second stage is MOD1.25 and the gear has a 12mm hex bore through most of it. Hubs with a 5mm bore and a 12mm hex are incredibly common and cheap so one of these will be pinned to the shaft and make these gears (which are rarely damaged due to the pitch and massive face width) easily swappable too. It has cut the amount of fasteners that need to be removed to work on it by about 75%

I do plan to run both these motors off a single ESC and really stress test the BBB current limiting! Though for once I have the space to add a second should it prove necessary.

The other prominent feature of the new weapon module is the repurposing of Klausforx which are 8mm Hardox and will sit slap bang in the middle of the robot. They will ride on a 6mm pin, though they are currently just sat on a bolt while I wait for the postman. They are rotation limited so they can’t fold underneath and I hope to have the traction to pluck them out from any wall gaps I get them wedged into.

I have made an amusing (frustrating) mistake which rather boils down to forgetting that magnets are magnetic and that permanent magnet DC motors have magnets…permanently

The right hand fork, if pushed all the way up will stick fast to the can of the Nerf motor. This in turn will lock the axe from completing a full swing. This is what we in the trade call “A Bloody Silly Mistake”. I am in the process of drawing up a little TPU bump stop that will cushion the impact and restrict the upwards travel to gain back some semblance of my dignity.

Downside of doing everything properly and not cutting every corner imaginable is it turns out pretty heavy. By the time I have that steel gear and a shaft in there I will have doubled the effective weight in the weapon system - this should be okay as I had wiggle room with the limit before and I have cut a whole weapon system out of the robot already - not to be ignored.

This subassembly just got a lot heavier. I had a smattering of Chinese parcels come all at once so I made really decent progress with the weapon system.
First and foremost was the 6mm silver steel shaft and collars to replace the random M6 bolt the forks ran on temporarily. It’s much nicer having something smooth and solid for them to sit on and the collars keep them nicely spaced and stop them from kinking too much and sticking or wobbling.

The gear turned up too, a chunky hardened steel 40t MOD1. It’s actually a pinion for a 1/8 RC car which affords me a usable 5mm bore and a narrow face width. I designed up a lasercut gear and had it interfacing with a cool hub then gave up and spent the six quid on two of these that do almost exactly the same thing. Downside is the weight as it top my scales at 45.5g. Meaty!

Naturally a gear with a 5mm bore needs a 5mm shaft so I printed myself a little jig to batch produce a couple easily. Just slip your rod inside (calm down) and you have a easy locator to file the flats on and bop two 2mm holes centrally through the shafts.

But Harry, I hear the masses cry, have you gone mad? Have you lost the plot with one foot out the door to go live under a bridge and eat glass bottles? Why on earth are you drilling holes through your damn shaft you handsome rebel. 

Arguably the answer is yes I have, but to follow the more pressing engineering question it is to use pins to drive these 12mm hex hubs from 1/10 scale RC cars. Pins locate them axiallly as well as transmitting torque. One should be enough so in keeping with the theme of this robot I used too.

These are stacked up and pushed inside that thick printed nylon gear and it feels pretty solid.

This is the stack up of components outside of the frame to illustrate where the bearings are and how much is going on in quite a small space. One of the best parts about all of this is it’s pretty much all off the shelf. I like the challenge of not relying on a custom designed part. The hunt for something that would work and all interface together is really satisfying.

And then all together! Ready for some transmission tests. I’m also going to be doing a little bit of delicate angle grinder surgery on the small pinions and the 40t gear to nip the facewidths down.

I got the motors bolted in and all the transmission components set up so I could test this. It was at this point Gareth (BBB's resistant electrical wizard) pointed out the neat endstop feature of the v3 BBB esc I was using on the weapon. This really would help with retracts and not damaging anything. With this in mind I printed a rear panel that has a micro switch mounting point and cut a chunk of 3mm HDPE to be a baseplate.

Here you can see it in the retract position. The switch has a little bit of foam heatshrunk (heatshrinkeded?) around the lever as a bit of compliance while I get a TPU bump stop finished.

Next up I pulled my finger out and started making armour. I printed a template in ABS and set it up on my ghetto router table. I screwed the pattern to the part using the mounting holes which worked well. Honestly it feels like such a cheat code for making plastic parts. Only downside is the mess and sometimes you get a chatter-ey finish. 

Not too shabby by any stretch of the imagination. Not winning any prizes for sure but it's nearly on the level of shitty desktop 3018 routers for pennies on the plastic dollar. Quick and dirty wins the race. 

Then I swapped in a 45 degree router bit to put the angle in. Much quicker than messing about with a hand plane like the MotherLoaders of old. Came out quite well to be fair. The front armour is 10mm HDPE which should be plenty for taking the abuse. I don’t intend to make spares I made the other half in the same way, just taking care to reverse the chamfer. Get a look at the absolute width of this chap!

My word what a wide, busy little nugget. It was truly immense at this stage and I was slightly regretting my decision not to smallify everything to the nth degree. Something seems very vulgar about a large robot. I miss the MK1 for that level of size and simplicity. Perhaps I should go back to making wedges. I had the proof of mobility deadline approaching rapidly at this point so I frantically got it to a drivable state. 

Despite the unbearable weight of massive girth it was remarkably tight inside - extra tight considering there are some very pinchy bitey bits of transmission slung right next to tightly packed wiring.  The tightness inside and being tighter on weight than I liked left me with the decision to ditch half the drive motors. I *really* wanted 4 motors as it fit the design brief of rugged, ugly power. Klaus was fantastic to drive with 4 of those motors on 4s but I let myself take the easy way out by harking on the simplicity angle. More space inside left me with less jam packed components and less chance of overheating, crushing or pinching. 

Luckily two is more than enough, but it is a bit of a failure on my part. I am proud of the fact I know my limits better these days and wasn't foolish enough to plough ahead to really sink that damn cost. Cut your losses, kill your darlings and dry your goddamn nylon. 

So it was about a week or so until Brawl so I was entering the “lots, but none at all” stages of progress. Most apparent is I cut out the 10mm yellow HDPE I am using for the sides. These are functionally identical to the old version but once the profile was cut I added a chamfer just for a bit of flair and to chuck out an extra couple grams. Produced once again with the 3d printed router template technique. I think they turned out really well for a handmade (technically) part. Just adds a little extra character to what could be just a rectangle with a 45 degree chunk out of it. It has two M4 screw inserts where it bolts too the wedge but otherwise is held with the shoulder bolts and two M4 countersunk bolts.

Also pulled my finger out and cast the new tracks. They’re 30a once again with a TPE core as it seemed to work well. I printed enough cores while I had the material loaded to have 3 pairs worth of spares. First time for everything! Now I can charge into spinners with even less fear. You can really see here how much better everything sits with only 2 motors. The battery has room for padding and no wires are smushed up against bulkheads and components. 

Finally managed to get my nylon back to a good place and was able to sort out the last of the big prints. They had to stay together while I finished up the mechanics and such. Now that that is out of the way it’ll get stripped down and dyed a healthy glowing yellow. Once it is suitably jaundiced it will be time for final assembly. Pretty happy with how it all came together. I made a lot of good progress with my time management and crisis control so I finished a functional robot early. 

When life gives you lemons etc. I did the classic yellow dylon bath for the printed nylon parts and it came out pretty well again. I’m looking forward to doing a robot that isn’t yellow so my hands don’t look quite so jaundiced/nicotine stained after fishing them out. Honestly I think this step is why I have a lot of luck with my nylon prints. Nylon loves water and that gives it a lot of flex. The warm water dye bath is absorption city and they come out so pliant and flexible. Not at TPU levels, they're still structurally stiff but I really like the properties and it really works for my design. 

I started doing final assembly at this point, putting in the proper loom and mounting up the end stop micro switch. The axe mechanism goes together and comes apart really well. Traditionally I don’t have to touch it so by the law of sod I’ll have to strip and rebuild every fight. All the wires run across that back board of the robot. Technically the only big spans are from the RH drive motor and the battery itself that get routed through the slot feature in the bulkheads - lots of clearance for an XT30. 

For the first time ever in 3 versions using the same piece of hardox ML is sporting some edge. Ground the axe head so it’s at least sharp. Still not deluded enough to think it’ll do anything but it at least looks like it’s trying and justifies its own sharp edge protection. 

Not to indulge too much in self congratulatory wankery but I adore this subassembly. It's so delightfully bitsy. It is almost wasted in a lumbering tracked shell. Add in some Beta/Terrorhurtz style folded polycarbonate and steel and it could be a lovely little chopper. Ah well. I'll just entomb it in chunky matte plastic lumps. 

Found another late stage wobble in the design. I went up a tooth on my drive pulley and that caused it to clash with the boss of the pinion gear. Not enough to notice on the model or at first glance but you definitely felt it clicking as you turned it by hand. I had to ghetto lathe (drill & file) it down and it was unbrilliant but functional. 

Done! ish. This is pretty much as good as it got. Completed and underweight with days to spare. I am writing this off as a success from the goals I set for myself. Simple, driveable and rugged as I can build it. I genuinely think it is the best it can be with the parts I have, the methods I selected and my ability to design *this* specific robot. It might sounds like that is a lot of conditions and concessions I made for myself - and that's because I have.  The whole aim was not to reach too high or make it into something more special than it needed to be. It wins my criteria purely by existing.  That might not have come across like I mean it, I haven't articulated it particularly clearly. 

Last run-around before the competition! Drove super well and was responsive enough. I split the weapon off to a separate transmitter as I found that incredibly helpful. I drive on an I6 and my wife is on axe duty on the GT5. 

As is customary I snapped a picture with the shell of the prior version which was also coming with me to Bristol as a stop on it’s way to it’s new home. You can see T34 is a touch wider and fractionally longer thanks to the forks. The chassis profile is identical all the way back to MK1. 

My first fight was against Digestive and The Mangler. Two polar approaches for naming on show here. I was a little on the back foot to be the only non spinner but it was quite nice in a way. What a way to put the robot through it’s paces! Cards on the table, I wasn’t too worried about Mangler as while it had the potential to get to the thinnest armour I felt confident I could avoid getting into bad situations and I could overpower them from a drive point of view. Digestive was the real worry.

I was correct to be worried. Verts get a fearsome reputation and that’s one I feed into myself but not all are created equal. The speed of the drive and the sheer anger in the weapon meant I could not keep up in any meaningful way and just became a bit of a chew toy.

I take a slim moral victory in the fact that I was able to keep soaking up some really nasty hits without really suffering. The lights stayed on and everyone was most certainly still home. The HDPE stood up well and I’m glad I went for 10mm everywhere.

The worst but was arguably the baseplate which had been hole punched and had a substantial trench carved just shy of the important bits. Taking it off the robot I found it was badly warped. Cutting the smushed parts away seemed to remove the internal stress in the part and let it go from Pringle shaped to flat-ish. I was a little miffed at the track had come off as I was completely willing to keep going. I think it was just impact related though I’m not ruling out stretch.

I had a cup of tea and a scotch egg to steel my reserve and got on with mundane activities like charging batteries and bemoaning my now slightly wonky (ier) chassis.

I was then told I was fighting Tsukikage which was a bit of a downer for me. I do not do well with control fights. This robot was 4wd with lots of forks and pokey bits to get hung up on. I wasn’t realistically able to overpower him nor out drive him. I think potentially I had the speed advantage but not the wherewithal to make use of it.

We were a pretty even matchup with no quarter given either way in the battle for control. Meg was going absolutely buckwild with the axe which caused the front to jump a little on a miss but I think ultimately turned the tide as we landed more hits than we didn’t.

A loss and a win was a pretty good place to be, until I found out I’d drawn Andy.

I always tend to do a quick function check when I’m back to my table after a fight. Just blipping drive backwards and forward and seeing the axe twitch is enough for me. I did this post Tsukikage and all was well so I slapped the battery on charge. A little while later I picked up the robot to show or demonstrate something and found the right hand track had locked up completely and would not be back driven. Odd. I plugged the battery in to check further and was immediately greeted by thick white smoke and an unpleasant smell. It was like being back in school.

I just went head down and swapped the whole unit out. Thankfully ML is pretty easy to chop and change out components so it was a pretty easy fix. It was only later trying to run through the steps in my head did I hammer out a working theory.

-intensive driving fight causing a bit more heat than I’m used to
-scratch that, a LOT more heat. Enough to soften the epoxy of the windings.
-when it’s still hot it works just fine. Once it has time to cool, say the time it takes to charge a battery it has cooled and the windings have now set so they’re touching with no coating left on them.

Motor locks up, just waiting for a drop of current and then boom. Toasty.

I am willing to entertain other theories but that one seems to fit. Glad I checked as I would have looked like a monumental tit. Swaggering up to the arena, turning my robot on and having it immediately let out a sad cloud of smoke and stop working. Bet that would have gone down well with the marshals.

ANYWAY,

The Propane was pretty short and brutal with me failing to get any footing once again and just resolving myself to tanking hits and trying to outlast Andy in the hope he broke his hardened fist on my wobbly yellow face. Unfortunately the repeated abuse knocked the track off but I was in a position to wiggle onward, soaking up a few more hits before a nasty hit to the rear took out the link door, power light and link. Smashing the rear panel in the process. Dead in the water, it counted as a tap out but it was lost either way I just saved having to count to ten.

So that’s it. Finished as I started. The first version was what really got me back in to robots. I made something pretty rubbish but functional which a bit of flair and I have been chasing that ever since. I made a lot of mistakes and errors trying to recreate the purity and effectiveness of a weaponless wedge.

MotherLoader-T34 was designed to work. It was supposed to be brutal and hardy and be controllable. I took every step I could to make it reliable and drivable and honestly, this was pretty successful. It wasn’t the nicest looking or the most interesting thing I have built but I figured I had to take a step back. If I keep failing to make interesting and clever work for me, dumbing down to stay in my lane is a valid strategy.

I’m happy it got one win, with my low bar for success that’s pretty good going. At least over the last two years I haven’t gone backwards and that is no mean feat.

I have it firmly planted as being the last of it's kind. For over a year it has sat in the same condition as it came home from the event. The reason this post has been written up now (13 months later) is I relented and cracked it open. I have been working on some pretty cool stuff (Hard Nips and a new Klaus) but I yearn to just have a plug n play damage sponge. 

I made the false assumption that as it was working it was ready to go. This was pretty much an error. It's going to need a fairly large shakedown in order to be anything other than a display trophy. I'm sidestepping my rule about this being the last one by just kind of fixing it rather than redesigning anything. 

My shopping list so far involves 
- making new tracks
- fixing the axe 
- neaten and simplify the internals 
- link replaced with a switch 
- making the drive more robust. 

These are all fairly low effort high reward so I'm pretty on board with actioning these quietly in the background. I feel I owe it to the lineage to have it at least as a backup beetle. Watch this space!