Tuesday 1 April 2014

Massacre Build 6

And now it's April. How in the hell did it get here this fast, it was February a month ago!

We left off with me just getting the gearbox into a vaguely gearbox shaped object. I spent a few days tinkering with it and trying to get it to function. First up was a package from Belting online who are a pretty good source of ALL THE EVERYTHING power transmission wise. Got a 10mm bore stuck on the pulley because I don't have a lathe (yet) and a 3mm keyway (same as the angle grinder gear)




As you can see I immediately shoved shit together and Pretend-O-Gearboxen'd. It looks like it would fit nice. I had intended to use bearings for super legitness but neglected to take into account the fact that I can't do holes accurate enough for bearings and this setup is kinda sorta rly rly important.


Late night eBay order to the rescue. I grabbed 5 bronze bushings with a 10mm bore and a 13mm OD, lucky for me 13mm is the largest drill I own and bushings aren't as sensitive to proper sized holes as bearings. Also in that picture is a shaft I sneakily machined in college while nobody was looking and a back of M5 high tensile bolts for reasons of bolts.


Motor was shoved into the Open Rangleboxen once the hole was drilled. Holes for the bushings were bored out and the bushings mounted with the pushfit of awesome. PITA to get them out which I take to mean they won't fall out on me. Also now I love flanged bearing things. Such convenience, much useful wow.


That right there is a 100mm (4")  Robochallange "Blue wheel" to show you lowness. A fair few robots still use these so Massy may get a bit dwarfed.


Banana for scale.


Shot of the internals from above. Its tight and is going to get tighter once wiring happens. Yay.

A new day and more progress was made. I drilled out most of the holes for the baseplate where bolts will go through into the bulkheads. I was expecting drilling hardox to be a massive pain in the arse but in fact I bummed out all the holes in under 10 mins. Ghetto machining of course (I used a sharp centre drill then opened it up about a millimetre at a time, all regular HSS)



I also cleaned it up a little bit to make it a bit prettier. I then set about carving up the aluminium panels some more. They had holes drilled and countersunk for the face of the drive motors to bolt to and holes drilled and tapped to bolt them to the baseplate.




I then turned my attention back to the Open Rangleboxen. I was trying to get the gears to mesh properly. After about an hour, hour half of grinding and wiggling I got them to play nicely with each other.


On a shadily charged 3s LiPo it functions, which is amazing considering the bodge that constituted its build and design.


Slightly less pretending as motor is now mounted and the gears mesh!

Then came the time of having to key the shafts. Because for some reason I couldn't actually find 10mm keyed shaft stock that didn't cost infinite pounds, what's up with that?  My horrible homebrew involves grinding a slight flat on the bar and using a 3mm endmill to create my keyway. To be honest my machine isn't rigid enough for this really. It came out kinda rubbish but it functions. I created the key from grinding down some stock until it fit. I'm so professional it hurts sometimes.






Will epoxy the key into the pulley and slide the shaft in from the top hopefully. Fingers crossed that this works.




Spent a bit of time working on the electrics. You can see them just roughly positioned in the above photos and also I stuck it on the scale. 11.6kg without shaft, wedge or top cover. I'm okay with that but I'm really unsure of accuracy.  Also test drive w00t!


More college sneak machining produced this, the main shaft. 25 OD for 100mm and 30 dia at the bottom 20mm. All dimensions are accurate to within 0.1mm. Or at least they were until I started hacking it about. Bored out a 10mm hole in the centre on the mill for the wiring for the removable link to go into.




Pictures of robot on grass, showing of shaft and the messy clusterfuck of wiring that I am yet to tidy up.


Drilled and tapped the mounting holes for the Open Rangleboxen, high tensile M5.


Mounted to the base and checking pulley centre distance was okay and it was. Tension looks to be all right too. That does worry me with a smooth pulley and all.


Chopping down the shaft so I can make the part that fits over it be the correct height. I made a bit of a stupid mistake and made the 30mm portion 12mm longer than it needs to be. Cut about 10mm off and milled the rest flat.


Ladies and gentlemen, how to kill your arm. Yeah this is cutting some 75mm (3") round steel by hand. Fun times. It has a 25mm hole bored through the centre and you can see I already squared one side up on the mill.


Bastard finally got cut off. I need a bandsaw or slave to do this shit for me.



Dodgy milling done. Well it's not done but  its mostly squared off at least.


Here you see the Chunk-O-Steel in its natural habitat. Shaft base alpha. Also padding  and mounting has been added to the lipo and some spaghetti wiring happened on the motors.

Next up was a job I'd been putting off for a while, making the top panel. Its made out of tinted polycarbonate (because coolness factor and it was like 50 pence cheaper than regular when I ordered it) Its not really to plate material but when you have 8mm of hardened fuckoff spinning angrily above it it should be fine.




Panel being cut to size, got some useful sized strips of that polycarbonate. Managed to cut fairly straight too.


Not sure how I managed to do this amount of damage with bloody plastic though, I must have punched the edge of it or something.




Marked out the centre and went at it with a hole saw. Pleasantly surprised with the result.


Painted the bar. Just got a coat of matte black on the top and kept the bare shiny metal at the sides.

One final thing to end on is that I got my draws for the fights yesterday and they are as follows (spread over two days, 2 per day)



Massacre v Defector
Massacre v Drumroll 2 v Conker
Endeavor v Defector v Massacre
DB10 v No Toy v Massacre

Defector is a flipper, built by Mario, the guy who helped me out with the bars and ESC of Massacre. Its a well constructed HDPE brick of a thing with a very powerful weapon. Its got me worried as I have to deal with it twice.

Drumroll is, rather as the name suggests a drum spinner. Always been a regular at the champs and normally does pretty well although not as well as it should. The driver and builder is one of the nicest people in the sport. Its been heavily upgraded this year, faster more powerful drive, grippyer wheels and a milled aluminium frame (using the same grade of aluminium as me, from the same place and I think milled on the same model of mill) Weapon is powered by a large scorpion outrunner and can really fuck shit up if needs be.

Conker is a single tooth eggbeater robot which has the same powerful drive as drumroll but less speed. It makes up for this with 4wd so it should be a formidable pusher should the weapon go. Weapon motor is again a scorpion outrunner, but an even bigger one. The robot is a CNC'd 7075 wet dream with watercut hardox armour that makes it a brick. Be interesting to see if I can do anything with it.

Endeavor is a HDPE and Hardox brick shithouse. Its very solid and very reliable. It went unscathed through last years champs and they have improved it further (and painted the scoop yellow) Drive motors are moderately powerful, just above drill motors i think and they have fairly grippy wheels and excellent weight distribution. I think I'll just have to try and hammer them and rack up points and not let them box rush me.

DB10 is a vertical spinner with both a steel and titanium disc. Both of which have hardox insert teeth. No idea what is powering the weapon but it looks scary. Drive is powerful, its invertible and it has a very very cool wheel setup that looks like it will yield a lot of push. Looks to be CNC milled aluminium frame with titanium armour layered on top. Very tough. Looks like it could do some serious damage.

No Toy is a electric axe robot that had its first outing last year and has been improved ever since. The builder seems to know his stuff pretty well and the axe is quite worrying considering my top armour. Drive is only some drill motors but it will have moderate speed and pushing power. Its Nylon and aluminium I think so I may be able to damage it there. I think my best bet is to keep spinning and keep it away from my polycarb lid.


So that's it. Congrats if you read this far. Cheers, Haz. 

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