Yes, yes I do. STOP REMINDING ME OR YOU’RE HELPING MACHINE THINGS.

Well here we are, after the airing of the Overhaul vs. Sawblaze fight which will be on Science Channel’s website and other streaming service soon! I have a full writeup I need to do on the lead-in and post-match analysis for that one! That will come after the conclusion of the build series in this post.

We rejoin our heroe…. dumbasses in the 2nd-into-3rd week of March. March 21st was the latest ship date available for east coast teams in order for everything to make it there on time (or so we were told!?). Luckily, Overhaul was actually not in a bad position, at least compared to Season 2 when the extra long days really started kicking in. All I really had to do at this point was a final assembly, then work on remaining spare assemblies.

After the Week of #WeldingGoneWild, it was actually very easy to do a fitting of the whole front of the bot.

That’s about it. The only thing which wasn’t added in this photo was the clamp actuator itself.

I’m much more a fan of this design already. Once the whole thing is loosely assembled, there is a degree of “elastic averaging” *ahem* that goes on as all the bolts get tightened down, but after that, the arms are rock solid.

The drivetrain is being assembled more now. Check out the Markforged nylon engine timing chain style guides! The front chain was still a bit loose after this so (at the event) I ended up making a different set, to be shown.

The one on the right between the two motors is a little ridiculous. We were running so tight on time that I wasn’t going to get the #35 half-links of chain in on time, or at least too close to risk not being able to drive test. So I invented the stupidest possible chain -pincher for the intermediate drive chain – it was gonna wear out very fast with its profile, but would at least let me get some test driving in.

Closing up the other drive side. The design for serviceability that I did 2 years ago is really coming back to help me here. Remember, my team this year is scattered – Paige is working a real job across the country, Cynthia is occupied full-time and could only help on a limited basis with set-up operations, and I only had Allen’s help briefly with welding too. Most of the photos taken in this build series was work done by myself solely.

Here’s the first test-fitment of the entire bot with all hardware installed. I’m really liking all the design changes to the steel parts. In person, the new clamp and forks look better proportioned to the bot. At least to me, way better than OH2 for 2016.

(Fun game: See how many dumb project artifacts you can spot in the background of this and other photos. Chibi-Mikuvan currently resides under my desk.)

 

I spent an evening just pounding out spare parts for the incipient shipment. For one, I was short on drive motors now, but with a shipment of new HobbyKing Sk3 6374-192s waiting, I needed to key the shafts and secure the hardware. It was easier to pop the shafts out en masse and set up the mill properly.

This and more! I went through….. zero 2mm endmills, somehow. Still a harrowing operation.

It was now the weekend before, and I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get my last round of waterjet-cut parts in time. These days, I get to be in the back of the line for MIT shop waterjetting – which I think is a very reasonable voluntary position to be in, as I have no official involvement any more with the institute. But dangit Sawblaze, you guys still do!

The electrical deck could conceivably just be drilled from a plate of aluminum, so that is what I ended up having to do. Out comes the TERRORISM. I just cut a chunk of 1/4″ aluminum plate out and started marking holes like high school Charles would have done, and he is always right.

Please do not ever, ever, ever do this. This is how you die. This photo is for illustrative purposes only and should never be attempted, building a robot is dangerous, etc. If you do, use the finest tooth blade you can get and have someone else pump WD-40 or cutting fluid constantly. Or you will die.

 

In the middle of the process. All the small holes are #4-40 tapped for Brushless Rages. Notice how I put six holes in some positions? This will be important later.

 

I’m loading up the bot with electrical deck hardware and wiring now. The shock mounts are in (and secured from the bottom) and some of the battery harness is visible.

The wiring for Overhaul this time was…… ad hoc, to say the least. I said I would dispense with the carefully cultivated greenhouse of busbars. The fanout occurs at the master switch terminals this time, with 8 gauge main leads splitting into multiple 12-gauge intermediate cables to the Brushless Rages. Single 6-AWG conductors handle the “fan-in” from the 4 batteries to the master switches.

The octopus taking shape, with ESCs installed.

Remember those 6-hole patterns? I had to temporarily use the 6-FET models for drive, keeping the 12-FETs for lifting and clamping.

What, are they magic or something? In actuality far underrated from their published specs?!

No, but I accidentally sold my entire product line – which is great – leaving ME with no remaining 12-FET units – which isn’t great. I had to dig into all my pre-production units here to even complete Overhaul at all. What is stock tracking even??

I wasn’t running off a cliff without a drone backpack, by the way. A month earlier, I had placed the assembly order for a new batch of Brushless Rages, but they wouldn’t get in until the Monday of the ship week and I was not taking any chances.

With the octopus wired in, the drive base is live for the first time. Check out the motor-on-a-stick I used to simulate having a clamp motor.

 

Overhaul prior to its first indoor test drive! At this point, I’d fight in 20 minutes if I had to. I think I was actually ahead of the curve here by a distressing amount.

 

I cleaned up and routed more wires into loom in order to un-nest the wiring some. This is inconceivably ugly to me, like a steaming fresh pile of partly-regurgitated dog squeeze smeared across a sidewalk by multiple unassuming passerby. I would never ship this in a consulting project. Yet some of y’all at the event said this was the cleanest wiring in a bot ever? What the actual hell is wrong with you?

(After seeing inside everyone’s bots, I’m not inclined to disagree. Sorry not sorry.)

 

Monday came, and hey! Look what’s here! More Brushless RageBridge units for all! I’d end up assembling 25 12-FET units and packing them with me to the event (not including my own spares, which were 4x for drive plus another 4x for spare overhead)

One of the put-off things was welding the wedges together beyond just tacking, so I spent much of Tuesday doing this. The plan was to take the tacked units to MIT to use one of the MIG welders I have access to and really smash them out quickly.  Using the bot itself as a welding jig made for expedient alignment of all my wooden dinosaur puzzle pieces.

DETHPLOW ™ was tacked together in the same fashion, by actually mounting all the pieces to the bot and locally squeezing with clamps.

For completion purposes, I fully TIG welded one set of pointy-wedges and mounted them on the bot in their final positions. TIG welding is truly the wrong technique to use for bitey pointy robot parts, in my opinion, since it takes so much time compared to MIG in an application where the sensitivity is not really reflected in the end product.

As I mentioned previously, it ended up pissing us off so much we immediately bought a MIG welder after we all got back from the event.

This, for instance, is DETHPLOW all MIG-welded together, a process which took only 15 minutes or so once it was jigged up. I designed all these pieces to be MIG-filled anyway. Here I am doing some TIG touchup on areas which I fell a little short with the wirefeed or missed, or had a gap that I couldn’t bridge as the fitup wasn’t 100% perfect. This is a fine state of affairs for me – blitzing and then fine tuning if needed.

One thing which occurred over the weekend was crate setup. I decided to just spent money this time to get an elegant and reusable SINGLE. PALLET. solution. As someone who’s had two double-pallet crates wrecked over two BattleBots seasons for reasons unknown, I decided I was much better off with a tall single pallet. U-Line came to the rescue with this 4′ x 4′ x 6′ tall snap-together crate,which I modified by adding some removable side-in shelving levels. The bot with its lift table and large tool chests/boxes was to fill the bottom floor, and more containerized accessory suitcases in the middle, along with the pictured Markforged gear – Markforged went ahead and lent me a 2nd printer for the event.

The top level would contain the loose large parts such as the frame rails and spare welded assemblies.

You know all those spare-everythings I was cutting and machining? They ended up in a tote which contained all the important mechanical bits of the bot. I’d prepped a full set of drive and lift motor spares, along with a few mor prepared motors. There was also enough cut tube sections to weld up a new clamp at the event if it came to be.

 

And here it is, Overhaul and all of its support equipment and tools plus spare parts, all ready to load up into….

 

Vantruck??????????????

 

THE PLOT THICKENS! During the week prior to shipment, a few of us NE builders came together to ally ourselves against the forces of time.

You see, Team Forge & Farm was planning to road trip across the country with their bot in tow. For a nominal fee of a few spare RageBridges, they were willing to also bring Overhaul along.

This effectively bought me an extra 4 days to work on the bot – in fact, the electrical work and spare welding photos you see were done after the 21st. On the Monday following shipdate, I picked up HUGE along the way and ended up in southern New Jersey.

 

…where, under the cover of darkness, we packed Earl’s truck up with our bots and his alike.

So… what’s in the crate? Well, there was still the lift cart and all of the already-completed spares, the printer, the mechanical tote, and other support equipment like the battery chargers and power supplies, and a few doen Ragebridges of various flavors. I handed off the radio suitcase and both of my event toolboxes off with the robot.

 

There were still a few kibbles I had to take care of after the bot went out but before I did. So, how do you jig up pieces for welding with you don’t have a robot???

You 3D print an imitation of the robot! This is an Onyx print with the same hole spacings and offsets as an Overhaul front frame rail. I used it to tack the pieces together quickly (as to not melt anything) before removing them.

And with that, the build of Overhaul 2 for the new BattleBots concludes. To be entirely honest, I found this build season pretty stress-free, largely because I didn’t have to build a new bot from scratch and was making only well-scoped changes I had anticipated in advance. In the position I am in now working on a new company with my friends, I don’t think I could have pulled off the record build of OH2 for Season 2 in 2016. My (and my friends’) experiences in this build and competition season of BB – without going into NDA details of the show – has really shown me that I have to move back to a “When it’s ready” format like I had to do during my busiest times at MIT trying to vaguely graduate on time. I have a lot of thoughts on the show as a whole and the direction I’d like to move in (and the show should/shouldn’t move in) that are much better reserved until after the entire show airs.

But for now, hang out here a bit for the event report and a SawBlaze vs. Overhaul post-match!

And now a word from our sponsors!

HobbyKing – Somehow still loves me and enthusiastically supportive of my efforts to abuse R/C model parts for unintended applications! I’m running a HobbyKing radio (9XR Pro) and batteries (Graphene 6000 65C 6S packs, times 4), motors (SK3 63-series), BECs, and a whole lot of wiring and connectors. Not to mention the Reaktor battery chargers and who knows what other HK kibbles have made it into my tools and accessories. I like to think that I had a large role to play in the commoditization of silly electric vehicles using R/C parts also.

MarkForged – from the days when I knew 50% of the company to today when half the new marketing and sales staff go “Who is…. Professor Charles?”, they’ve provided me with high-strength printed parts for a lot of different projects, both on this site and off. Introducing them to the robot fighting community via Jamison’s and my efforts pretty much made MarkForged printed-unibodies the competitive standard in the 1 and 3lb classes, and trying to find new niches in the bigger weight classes is one of my goals. This time, Overhaul’s drive wheel hubs and casting molds are printed from Onyx, and there are also plenty of smaller chain glides and tensioners and accessory parts.

SSAB – I find it interesting that the company’s full name is SSAB AB – Svenskt Stål AB AB, or Swedish Steel Company Company, but these days the lettering is the whole company name so that’s actually not true. This year, I’m working with one of their North America regional distributors and all of the armor steel on Overhaul – including the entire clamp arm, top plates, and new wedgelets and DETHPLOW™ are Hardox 450. Hardox is the easily-obtained ARx00 of Europe and other regions worldwide, and bots overseas have used it for years, but it’s not really had a foothold here in our scene compared to the number of AR-spec steel products in the US. So hopefully I can help with advancing that brand too!

BaneBots – I was called an edgelord for even thinking about using P80 gearboxes in a modern Battlebot. I always thought they were under-loved after the FIRST Robotics Competition quality issues of the late noughties, and had used them otherwise in several projects including consulting projects before shoving shorty Ampflow motors into them for Overhaul 1 in 2015. And you know what!? They’re great! Overhaul 2 ran them exclusively for Season 2, and now for Season 3, OH is sporting the new BB220 series with much stronger planetary output stages for the lifter.

Equals Zero Designs – Yeah, umm, I don’t know much about those assclowns.

Wasn’t that an insane season premier episode!? If you missed it, it even seems like they’re distributing the episodes in more creative ways this time, up and including Prime Video. That’s good news, including for me, who can’t be buttsed to TV like 99.5% of people near my age group and lower, and so can barely watch his own damn TV show. I’m fairly confident Overhaul will first be on the 3rd episode, so I think it will time well with the conclusion of this series.

The bulk of the physical construction took place around the first and second weeks of March. Actually, let me rewind the clocker just a little bit, back to the last weekend of February.

I got another shipment of stuff from Markforged, which is returning this season as one of the team sponsors. First, a bunch of Onyx filament to print wheel hubs with, as well as two large molds made on the Mark X series machines which have a bigger build volume. The Mark Two is limited to around 5″ in the width dimension, and guess what has 5″ wheels?! I printed a pair of 3″ front wheel molds in-house from Nylon, since that’s much smaller than the build volume limit.

Printing each pair of large wheel cores actually takes an entire day (22 hours, anyway) so it’s kind of a long process to make a dozen wheels. However, it was easy to pipeline everything once I got the prints going, as the polyurethane also happens to want about a day before demolding.

The resin of choice was Smooth-On Reoflex 60. I had plenty of good experiences with Reoflex 50 in Überclocker, but thought it wore a little fast and that Overhaul’s overpowered drivetrain would make that worse. So I elected to move up on the durometer rating, and 60A is similar to Colson wheels.  I got a small pack from the local distributor around here, Reynolds, to test my process and also the amount of liquid pigment needed. See, the native color of the Reoflex resin is a pleasant ｐｏｏｐ　ｂｒｏｗｎ color, which is actually too dark to turn MIKU BLUE. So whatever, black wheels it is.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how the hell these wheels are supposed to demold. The molds are one-piece with zero draft, so it should be some kind of physical impossibility…. but then you realize that is what the screwy tread profile does!

I went light on the mold release here, and subsequent wheels actually popped out easier than that. Have I mentioned it’s also awkward trying to hold a camera at the same time as keeping yourself upright AND applying several Torques to something? At least a few torques.

They didn’t all work out though. The first center wheel mold I got from Markforged seemed to have some extrusion problems for the exposed surfaces, leaving them porous. We figured I’d just try slathering on the mold release as they reprinted it.

Nah, this one was stuck for good. Later on, I actually cut this mold open and discovered the resin had seeped entirely down through the floor of the mold and even through the inner walls due to its porosity… Yup, not unscrewing this one.

The reprinted mold was fine.

The problem with a robot with much larger wheels…. is that little sample pack pretty much only lasted those three initial wheels. So guess who now owns an entire gallon of goo? There is no intemediate size between the small trial-size and the full gallon.

These buckets are kind of crappy to use without dispensing equipment setup, but luckily I managed to get the workflow down for pouring them, and only got everything slightly gooey.

All of the frame rails now have brace plate holes-to-be-tapped drilled into them, so frame reassembly can begin in parallel with the remaining operations on new drivetrain and clamp/fork parts.

The first things to go back together are the liftgear and new lift motors.

One assembled front 3″ wheel… I’m liking these already.  The tread adhesion is outstanding – I can’t begin to tear the sidewall away from the face of the wheel. That and the mechanical over-molded interface means short of getting these things cut off, I’m not going to lose the tread.

A little bit more progress on reassembly, now with added drive motors.

Going on in parallel with the wheel casting and reassembly was lots and lots of welding. This damn thing almost has too much welding on it. I also know that I only say that because during this build, we didn’t have a MIG welder, only a TIG.

Here’s why – TIG welding is a very slow, methodical process which gives the welder maximum control over the weld composition. For the things we’ve been doing for “work” and consulting projects, this has been great! What it’s not good at is making large amounts of obnoxious fat welds quickly, for things which are only meant to run into each other over and over. Really, a lot of what you’ll see in the arms was designed for MIG welding, but I couldn’t gain access to my usual one back at MIT until nearly the very end of the build season. Putting Overhaul’s arms together, and Brutus’ wedges and plows, were processes which took up an entire day, or days.

The combined builds of Brutus and Overhaul made us go out and buy a MIG welder because of how bad it was. So that obviously won’t be a problem again, since now we have a Millermatic 211 in the arsenal.

However, I will begin with pointing out that a TIG welder is great for performing an act of terror I learned during my MIT career: TIG bending. Hey, it creates a highly localized heat region! By gliding the torch over a line scribed into some metal, you can very easily get it up to formability temperature. The upside is also a smaller HAZ than (in my experience) with an oxy-acetylene torch.

To make these bends in Overhaul’s future ears, I simply dumped 200 amps of TIG into them for a minute or so and then quickly threw them in the brake press. The welded-like appearance is actually very superficial and was a result of the metal surface liquefying somewhat.

The clamp side plates required some cleaning and standoff tubes machined. I actually didn’t have to buy any new tubing for this clamp design – all of it was either from some other tubular object on Overhaul, or could be slightly machined to the needed diameter. The machined tubes were advantageous since I could control the width of the assembly precisely using the turned shoulder.

SSAB’s Hardox comes with a paint-like coating instead of the heavy hot-rolled mill scale that I see a lot on generic AR grade steel. It comes off very quickly with a flap disc, whereas last season involved several hours of grinding with a solid wheel to get the material to clean weldable state.

Other weld prep included fitting the new lift hub pieces together – some diameters had to be cleaned up and shoulders turned once again.

I had to do a rather hilarious setup on the ears which connect to the clamp actuator in order to clean up the internal bore. Yep, that’s 4 out of 6 jaws.

Here I am doing the first assembly tacks on the lift hub. I have a very strange welding habit: I like doing my setup with the TIG welder, then switching to MIG to finish out. This is solely because I have no patience whatsoever for TIG.

Remember those little flats that were cut into the actuator ears and endcaps? Check out the parallels on the bottom – they help align everything so there is no complex fixturing needed.

Blah blah blah… welder and paint, grinder I ain’t, etc.

Because the clamp arm’s aluminum pivot rings still need to go over these, I had to clean the endcap welds up on the lathe afterwards.

A finished lift hub with endcaps threaded and with bearings made of oil impregnated nylon. I actually found a blank that I had machined most of to the correct dimensions, so making more was easy. I had more unfinished blanks which I machined new arm bushings for from also.

It was now Pi day, and New England greeted us with like the 3rd winter storm in 3 weeks. But the build must go on! Never give up, never surrender (seriously kids, don’t ever move up here. it’s not worth it. it’s expensive, shitty, and cold). I set out to Mid-City Steel which was able to quickly supply plasma-cut Hardox 450 parts on short notice and for very low ruble. Combined in this order are more parts for Brutus.

With this order came the first DETHPLOW (out of 2 – I entered a 2nd supplementary order for more spares) and all the arm parts too.

Plot twist: The arms are mild steel.

Yes, yes, finally obtain mythical Hardox sponsorship, end up making lifter forks from goopy mild. I was ready to design the arms to be made from HX450 also, but couldn’t help thinking if the arms were extremely rigid, that something happening to them would just take out everything upstream – the lift hub, main shaft, etc. which are decided not very Hardy or Ox-y.

Therefore, mild steel arms it is. Depending on how they perform in the season, this might be changed down the line.

Setting up the arms for welding was a similar process to everything else – chop and turn some tubes, and clamp it all together. I for one don’t mind if we bought a CNC plasma cutter. Before these industrial processes (which themselves are rather “old school” and established) were “discovered” by the robot community, welding a frame together was a much bigger deal and required much more setup and skill. This was the environment I grew up in, so that’s why it took me so long to learn and appreciate welding.

Here I am putting the arms together with our Miller 200 amp TIG in the foreground.

Hey, wait… That’s not actually me! That’s…

Allen, a new team mate for this season, who is a ‘graduated duckling’ of my involvement with New York Maker Faire and the Power Racing Series. These days, he’s a mechanical engineering student at Stony Brook. I stole him for their spring break and basically trained him from-scratch on TIG welding, upon which he somehow dumped the entire tank of argon over the course of the week.

First of all, it was a lot of welding, if I haven’t made myself clear on this front. But I do think the regulator was set up for too much gas in general, since at one point the flowmeter had something heavy run into it and did not work properly, and we set it up by listening to it. Sigmas! We have none!

(We do now have a new flowmeter)

 

Allen put together essentially everything you see in this build report that wasn’t the lift hub. This is a photo of the two Overhaul heads under construction. It was jigged up using the lift hub on one end and the spacers for the tooth on the other.

Your Godfather horse-head moment for this build.

Connecting all of the welded bits together was actually very painless this time. Think this means I’m getting better at design-for-welding! This is a test-fitted complete lifter assembly. Not pictured are the spare set of long arms and pair of finished short T-Rex arms. And the other lift hub. And Ｄ　Ｅ　Ｔ　Ｈ　Ｐ　Ｌ　Ｏ　Ｗ.

Mechanical re-integration of the bot progressed quickly from this point. Check back in next week for more original content!