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Sadbot and Overhaul Go To Comicpalooza: Scale Model Testing Your BattleBots At Full Scale

chorl4 Comments

Just because all this van stuff was going on doesn’t mean I put down the robots last year. Never a dull moment around these parts! Interspersed between the Operation IDIocracy work over the summer and the Econocrane Saga was a heavyweight sportsman-style event held at the Comicpalooza event in Houston, Texas, by the local organization Houston Area Combat Robotics.

Robots in mid-July in Houston sounds like a great way to get heat stroke, but it was a chance to do some shakedowns and validation on Overhaul that we didn’t really get to do at the 2021 BattleBots season. When you’re at the event itself, you’re really just in survival mode; whatever works works, don’t question it. Getting to run the bot at a low-stress show-off event means I can kinda retrace my steps and figure out exactly what was going on.

Anybody who watched the 2021 season probably saw that Overhaul had some… fire issues. I joked it was probably the 2nd most reliable flamethrower at the competition: It would always catch on fire somewhere around 2:15 to 2:30, plus or minus. Midway through the qualifying fights, I threw in the towel and switched the drive controllers from my 12-FET Brushless Rages to …

vesc

Disgraceful. Why not just go stick my head in the jaws and hit the go-stick at this rate?

The controller I’d worked for not too long and not very hard on… was just not capable of sustaining heavyweight-tier power reliably. The reasons were many, but centered around the fact that the old SimonK firmware, while dumb-of-ass enough to whip start any motor you want it to, was consequently also dumb enough that it never had any facilities for current control or limiting built in. So while they could overpower smaller motors, using them on anything bigger than, say, a 60mm series outrunner was asking for trouble if the motor stalled or there was a lot of reversing. A current-generation VESC frontend would easily handle the 12 FETs properly and cap the motor at whatever current you set it to.

I dish on VESC a lot for being another wayward open-source project turned product that requires a worldwide community of people shotgunning into the dark to support, much like 3D printers were last decade. But the truth is I basically watched the VESC project grow up and its proprietor Benjamin Vedder become a self-taught motor control engineer. He worked a lot with my buddy Shane who featured abundantly on this very site in yesteryears. I have only the highest respect for his work in development of the VESC bloodline, which started as a personal hobby project much like I never meant to sell Ragebridges.

Exclusive, never-publicly-shown photo of the Even Bigger Brushless Rage I made for Overhaul in 2021. These boards never made it off the bench because I lost motivation.

The thing that always bugged me, though, is the productizing of the hobby and community. A firmware version change might introduce new features but create new bugs and break old features. Dozens of different manufacturers stray from the project definition and controlled documents to implement their own features, some of which make it back upstream into one of said firmware updates but leave others in the lurch. Software UIs which change with every other version, and so on.

And there is, of course, no fixed documentation because it’s always out of date; the best way to get help is simply to wade through dozens or hundreds of forum posts and social media threads (just try setting up a new VESC using a Youtube video from 2017!). Because I always had my somewhat working controllers, I simply never looked in the VESC direction, and only observed the hand wringing coming from others in the community trying to blaze these new trails in the world of robot fighting.

But whatever the case, it was time to acknowledge that the combined autism of dozens of Europeans and hundreds of Chinese people was far more a force for progress than I could ever be alone. Just like how I’ll probably never build another custom hub motor unless it was purely for, uhh, self-enjoyment.

I did pick up two VESC 6 architecture based Trampa ESCs, confusingly called the “VESC 6 MK V”, right before the 2021 season because I had a SNEAKING FEELING they would be needed. And those were the ESCs which got stuffed into Overhaul. Because the C80/100 motors in Overhaul did not have Hall sensors, I had to fiddle the settings to use sensorless mode.

At the time, the sensorless FOC algorithm was pretty flaky and not great with transient loads,but worked fine for its intended purpose of skateboards, bikes, and hoverboard motor. So, I kept it on sensorless BLDC / block commutation mode, with input shaping like ramp-up times activated and the current control loop gains cranked way too high (a necessity at the time; many of these issues have been resolved in the Present Year)

This made the bot driveable but not superb, and I would have to constantly ‘drive the controller’ so to speak, instead of focusing on the bot itself. If Overhaul looked pretty slippery in the Black Dragon fight and the “Chair Fight” with Big Dill, that was why. I signed up for the event because I figured more stick time is a bare minimum even if I make no other meaningful progress on making the bot drive better.

But there was Sadbot too.

Two heavyweight platforms with allegedly identical powertrains I could use to make delta comparisons, and maybe even fight them against each other! Sadbot was in dire need of a renovation anyways, so I took this as an excuse to organize the piles of stuff that had accumulated on top of it and start appraising what needed a lube n’ tune.

I had bought two VESC 4.12 clones from Hobbyking a while back when I first felt like Brushless Rage needed to be phased out. I supplemented these with a few used units I picked up from someone who was upgrading. These 4.12s are roughly as capable as 6-fet Brushless Rage; they’re going to be underpowered driving a 80mm motor each, but the nice thing is they won’t blow up doing so.

The goal here wasn’t try to run Overhaul on these 4.1x units, but that I didn’t want to spend several hundred dollars on a set of 6.0 based ones for Sadbot yet. If these survive the C80/100 drive motors, so much the better.

Sadbot itself had gathered a whole lot of dust, cobwebs, and metal chips in random spots. Its last action was really Robot Ruckus in 2019, and it’s been pushed around the garage since then. I decided a comprehensive teardown and rebuild of the electrical deck and both Overhaul 1 wheel pods was warranted. So, I just dug in and started ripping everything out…

One increment I wanted to make from Overhaul was using the sensor-integrated C80/100 motors, since much of the development effort seems to have focused on perfecting the Field Oriented Control (FOC) algorithm assuming you have Hall sensors or an encoder.

Fair enough – sensorless starting has a lot more math involved in it, needing bigger and faster microcontrollers, and often requires close-in tuning of inductance, flux linkage, etc. quantities on individual motors. This makes it much harder to get right for a general purpose plug-in controller (In the Present Time, High Frequency Injection [HFI] based pole saliency detection has made its way into VESCs with the latest hardware rev)

The spare motors I picked up for Overhaul before the 2021 season did have Hall sensors, so I went ahead and knocked them apart to switch out the custom-made shafts of the older motors.

The drive pods got cleaned up on all fronts with new chains and lube and new threadlocker in the bolt holes. There were a lot of things which were getting loose and jiggly!

I also took apart the lifter pod to take a look at it all, but it did not need any work. Here’s the reassembled drive pods! They’ll go in last since they’ll make it harder to work on the electrical bay. I’ll finish that first by remaking the wiring to accommodate the VESCs.

Oh yeah! I picked up another Harbor Freight rock chisel thing to make a spare poker. The original Long Pink Member from 2019 was straightened out some, but I figured it wouldn’t live very long if it was bent back and forth more..

Most people using VESCs just throw them in with a bunch of foam wrapped in heat shrink or tape. This approach doesn’t sit right with me (Yes, yes, I know, their robots work and mine doesn’t) and I wanted to try and give them more heat sinking. They’ll be operating close to maximum power handling levels for longer periods of time, driving those C80/100 motors. The obvious problem is that the 4.1x VESCs don’t have a good way to mount to anything because they were kind of designed with being stuffed into a wiring harness in mind.

I came up with a clamping aluminum bar mount that will grab them by the FETussy. The back of the board, with the capacitors, will be secured by a zip tie mount.

The aluminum bar gets bolted into the existing big heat sink plate with a dollop of thermal compound in between.

Here’s how that looks! #4-40 long screws capture the VESCs in between them. The FETs get silicone sheet on the top and bottom for insulation. Heat transfer out of the plastic case on these D2PAK-7 packages isn’t great, which is why Brushless Rage and other controllers have always heat sunk through via-forests in a heavy-copper PCB. But it’s better than nothing.

With the mounting solution validated, I went ahead and worked on the heavy power wiring – extending motor wires, making new battery cables, and so on.

My automotive influence is showing here with all the wire loom. The sensor cables and motor phase leads were run separately to keep the motor current from beating the little Hall sensors …. uhh, senseless.

If needed, I was ready to put them in some conductive loom and ground the ends. Luckily, this turned out not to be needed – just keeping them from running next to each other was enough.

For someone whose entire line of work for over a decade and a half is “technology”, I sure hate technology. Specifically, I’m not personally so much a fan of “just configure it in the app”. Yes, you get much more flexibility and room for features if you have an app. But give me a row of DIP switches, blinkenlichten, and trimmer potentiometers any day.

The cool kids set up their VESCs with their phones because you can get them with Bluetooth now. I, meanwhile, could only find 1 short USB cable to do this with, necessitating this comical and totally safe setup. Sadbot, propped up on one half of a moving dolly, with my computer directly in the line of “Welp it hit the ground and kept going”.

The electrical deck is now all buttoned up with everything operational. The drivetrain controllers are set up in BLDC mode using Hall sensors, but the lifter was kept BLDC sensorless because the 6374 motor running it didn’t have them, and it’s geared down so far it didn’t matter.

I didn’t set the drivetrain controllers up in FOC because for one reason or another, I couldn’t get the FOC auto-detection to take. This may be one of those mismatched firmware, hardware, and software 3-way tangles I alluded to earlier. Dumb ol’ BLDC mode worked flawlessly, however.

Up front, I added something Sadbot has never had up to this point and just got away with: A weapon lock!

Yep, it was finally time. A simple 3/4″ hole drilled in 1/4″ thick steel strips will suffice for putting a bigass square lynch pin through.

Weapon lock all welded up in-place.

While Limewelder was warm, I went ahead and welded the poker solid where the striker interfaces with the tube, just like the old one.

With everything installed and tightened again, Sadbot came in at 220 pounds even! This is the weight of a “classic” heavyweight and what I had in mind when originally designing it in 2015 – the thought was maybe I’d head to Robogames which at the time was still running the 220 pound Heavyweight class. The ample weight allows me a lot of room to mod and add things if I wanted to run at 250 pounds.

Here’s the final hero shot of Sadbot, with weapon lock installed. And a low speed drive video!

I tried to not annihilate everything I owned, but did rip it a little harder in the driveway too. The sensored BLDC setup with the innate current-control loop drove great – I could feel the current limited acceleration, but for the most part it handled predictably. A sharp stop (like running into the curb) could trigger an overcurrent condition which needed me to back off the stick and try again. So I had to be mindful of this, but it only happened periodically. I wrote it off to “50A-ish rated controller trying to wag a motor which could easily drink 200 or more amps”.

The Road to Houston

Houston is about a 12 hour drive from Atlanta; while long, it’s certainly nothing I haven’t done many times before with my Boston to Atlanta (18 hour+) runs. For this trip, I chose the competent van because you should only live one meme at a time. This is also why I have never driven cross-country to BattleBots with a meme van: Don’t put your childhood dreams in series or you’ll cry over their shattered remains on the side of the interstate somewhere in New Texahoma. Live them in parallel with impedance matching.

Loading the robots in turned out to be very easy because I already had my equipment for hoisting heavy things around. Just chain them up and sling them in!

Overhaul was basically pulled out of the crate as-is, where-is, no warranty expressed or implied, no questions asked or answered. To be fair, it did leave the 2021 season ready to run because we were supposed to have another fight.

With all the equipment tossed in after it including handling carts, the Overhaul team tool chest, and spare parts, the reasons why I decided to maximize my automotive Asian Dad Energy for a daily consumable car are abundantly clear.

You can barely do this with a mid-size pickup truck (at least I’d need a bed cap) and the tailgate would be already up to my nostrils. One of my favorite activities is just slinging lumber and 4×8 construction panels into this thing at the Home Depot pro parking shack while dudebros hoist things into the 5’5 beds of their emotional support pickup trucks next to me.

The trip down I-10 was terminally uneventful. By the way, if you’re looking for some lizards, hit these people up! It’s been a very long time since I went to Houston – the last time I recall going was to see family friends when I was a wee caterpillar.

I chose I-10 instead of the more inland I-20 (then cutting south after the Texas border past Shreveport) because E A S Y. I got to see the swampworks of America including the Atchawichyaiwannalaya Basin Bridge among others, and traversing the lights and sights of the Houston energy corridor in southeast Texas was also entertaining.

I left Atlanta around 6AM and cruised into my hotel east of Houston around 10PM, managing to not bomb it the entire way but stop to check out some roadside knick-knack stores.

Next morning at load-in, setting Overhaul and friends up for the visiting crowd! A couple of bots were on display, such as Avalanche from Team Toad behind Overhaul there. It was also competing, so I suppose these were just demo models…

The event being one of only a tiny handful of Heavyweight-scale anything out there meant BattleBots Season 7 prospectives from all over the country also showed up. This is an early prototype version of Horizon, which was being bung together (photo captured mid-swing of the hammer) right up to the safety meeting.

Bunny of Malice set up the merch booth, which we all contributed to in order to satisfy the throngs of onlookers once the con opened.

Besides Overhaul and Sadbot, I also brought a con tchotchke in the form Your Waifu is Trash. This stupid thing has probably seen the most physical miles driven of any actual robot I’ve built, having been to almost every convention I have since 2019. I’ve worn through the brushes on at least one motor and changed wheels because they got too small and worn down from driving on concrete/asphalt.

It’s been a hit everywhere it’s gone, because giving people an avenue to depersonalize their insecurities and self-doubt has never been a flawed business model. I drove YWIT around in between fights, when we took breaks, and when the matches were done for the day.

Pit table shot! I kept Sadbot on the handtruck because it conveniently fit between the drive wheels and allowed access to it in all directions.

One other item I “invested” in before this event was a new charger for Overhaul. I wanted the ability to charge up to 12S lithium in a single bloc, as up to that point, Overhaul’s charger has been a set of 8S-limited Turnigy Reaktors. The battery enclosure had no internal wiring and just ran both battery leads out so I could plug both in. At home or if I didn’t give a shit, I just set my adjustable bench power supply to CC at 15 amps and CV at 49.2 volts (give it a bit of safety margin) and went about my day.

This iCharger X12 came to the rescue! It’s a current-generation charger that takes up to 48V in and can consequently poop up to and over 48 volts, handling over 1000 watts with an ability to regeneratively discharge into a master battery bank. The package is scary small for handling that much power, but I believe in modern semiconductors. In fact, it can overwhelm my puny 24 volt power supply instantaneously, so it’s time to upgrade!

Sadbot had an easy and fun time because of the non-spinner nature of the arena, which effectively dated back to the mid ’00s as one of the original Southeast Combat Robotics (SECR) boxes. One of my fights was with Slammo, who was also here to test out some new architectures and drive setups. This match was fun and tossy until Slammo quit working again, as for some reason it does.

Sadbot also had other fights against some more sumo/sportsman’y heavyweights from locals, and a Mild Salsa version of Mad Catter cheekily named Happy Catter.

At last, the meme happened as one of the final exhibition fights. I drove Overhaul while Bunny drove Sadbot. I literally bought a chair from Team Toad for $10 on the spot to use in this fight, where we set it up and I tried to drop Sadbot on it.

The handling difference between the two really motivated me to swap Overhaul to all new sensor-integrated C80s. Sadbot basically drove like it was brushed again, even if the VESCs still had infrequent (but still annoying) overcurrent faults just because of how outclassed they were by the motors. A swift return-stick-to-neutral was enough to overcome that. Overhaul, being still stuck in Sensorless BLDC mode with some tweaking, drove like an unloaded bus on ice in comparison. I had to anticipate when to turn and basically coast into it, or keep moving in one direction without direction changes.

Overhaul’s forks managed to tear up the drive on Sadbot pretty well, including bending both of the little chain-guiding nuggets and making Sadbot lose a drive side. In return, I accidentally drove the head actuator off the end of the screw trying to pick the chair back up, so Overhaul’s head came flopping downwards. Oops.

Unfortunately, the organizers had issues with the stream (found after the fact; they were thinnly manned and needed all the help they could get!) and as a result we don’t really have any good video from the event, especially the Heavyweight fights. They posted basically “raw” box feed videos at this link.

Sadbot appears in the following fights:

There are videos of the beetleweights and other weight classes on the promoter’s Youtube channel, though. Those were run in a separate arena and as a separate stream.

So I came away from Comicpalooza with a lot of good lessons learned and two working robots. Well how about that!? The real champion, though, we all know… is Your Waifu is Trash.

The lessons from this event went straight into Overhaul when I transitioned from Operation IDIocracy to Battlebots Season 7 prep. We changed all the drive motors – in-use and spares – to the sensored C80/100s, and I ordered spares of those.

I also got more VESC6 units from Trampa and set them all up in FOC mode with sensors, using one calibration/detection and propogating all the settings (The motors are all close enough together characteristics-wise that the small differences were not first-order impacts on control loop behavior). Other than that, the bot didn’t see that many changes and optimizations for Season 7. And, despite “Losing” a bunch again, I think Overhaul really had its best reliability and predictability season to date.

By the way, if the trip to Comicpalooza was comically loaded, the return trip was even funnier. I promised to bring Slammo back for Craig, so on top of all my gear, there was now a Slammo, its parts, its tools, and its handling equipment. He journeyed down from North Carolina a week or so later to collect it all.

I was surely running close to GVWR, and I got concerned enough to inflate the rear tires to 50 PSI for the return trip. I headed northwards out of Houston, taking the I-20 route back east because it turns out I-10 is just like the I-95 of the Gulf Coast: Always crowded, always jammed, always under construction, and everyone is out to kill you all of the time.

The Tale of Econocrane: The Summer Fling of 2022; Or, More Twin-Turbo System Testing!

chorl3 Comments

I received the message during the middle of Sunday at Momocon.

Come and get it. 700

– this dude

Still donning my trademark cat ear headphones, I ran through the crowd towards one of the many exits of the Georgia World Congress Center in a attempt to get some reception for the U-Haul trailer reservation.

It was too late in the day by then to get out and do the retrieval, so we struck a time for Monday. The next morning, I hitched up Vantruck at the local U-Haulmongers. At this point, these guys basically know me by name, and I pretty much just walk up and grab whatever I need. This is how you know things have gotten really bad.

So what the hell was I getting? Behold, this absolute something:

That’s… yeah, you know what. I don’t know either. Because I always have a heartbeat on the regional terrible diesel Ford van market, I tend to see listings pop up not long after they’re posted. And trust me, due to the prevalence of the van chassis in commercial applications, there are a lot of oddities.

This thing actually showed up for me back in August of 2021, and I went to inspect it at that time. It was located across town in the “acres of metal recycling yards, tire shops, and half burnt-down apartments” neighborhood, of which Atlanta actually has a couple but that’s besides the point. At that point the seller wanted $2500, which was quite optimistic for a non running chopped up ambulance chassis without a title. I figured I’d let it bake for a while before lowballing him, and then promptly forgot about it due to the impending Battlebots season and the fact that, you know, I already had three of these damn things.

That was, until that fateful Sunday. Basically, he was going to junk it the following week so it was me or the yard from whence it came. That’s right – I learned from him that he bought it from a junkyard which had built it as a side project. It certainly fit the bill, with a 12 foot flatbed and that makeshift towing empennage for dragging scraps around.

You know what? A little over the dollar amount it would have scrapped for is a great value for (YET ANOTHER) potential engine donor for Vantruck. If I build up a big enough pile of vans, surely one of them will be useful, right?

It was clearly an ambulance chassis with the box removed, and it still had the ambulance light and siren control console (but with all of the wiring scrapped out of it). The odometer showed around 58,000 miles, which seemed reasonable to me – ambulances usually don’t go very far, just idle and hang around a lot.

With immense difficulty, the seller and four of his buddies helped me winch the thing onto the tow dolly. Everyone made sure to take their guns out of their pockets and put them on the sidewalk beforehand, because safety first! We promptly discovered the front axle was too wide for the tow dolly – the lug nuts were digging into the plastic fenders, and there was no flex room available (These tow dollies rotate slightly at the axle centerline to aid in turning).

After some “SURGERY”, the right fender of the tow dolly and right side step of the… thing were removed, as right turns would necessarily be tighter and require more articulation. I bought a round of beverages for all involved for the three hours of finoodling this took.

And an hour later, I’ve bestowed yet another eyesore upon the neighborhood. A pox upon my house in particular, said my neighbors, presumably. As night fell, I prepared the tools and substances needed to perform a routine Unknown IDI Diesel Reboot. I’m not sure if I should be proud that this is now an SOP for me.

So in the end, this thing needed…. absolutely nothing.

Yup. Two freshly charged batteries and cleaned up cables and terminal clamps and off we went. I didn’t even get to use the Spicy Canned Air.

The general vibe with these old engines is that they need 1.21 jiggawatts to build the compression and to run the glow plug system, so any decay in the electrical system will quickly affect their ability to start. And for most people, batteries and electrical systems are basically black magic, which is why so many of these listings say “Needs fuel pump idk” when the real issue is they can’t turn over fast enough to light off.

I pulled it gently off the dolly and slowly backed up the driveway – that front tire had fallen off the bead, so it couldn’t be inflated. I had to replace at least 3 tires due to dry rot anyhow, so no biggie.

Not wanting to extend my U-Haul rental another day, I had to now put the fender back on before returning it. Mikuvan acted as the yard shunt to get the dolly closer to the garage. These fenders have 4 bolts holding them on, but the light is not on a connector – we had to cut the cable off, so I had to reattach it.

I quickly spliced the cord back together with some solder-shrink splices. Notice that these wires have already been spliced once? Makes you wonder if someone has been in here before with the same idea.

Maybe I should mark that down as pre-existing damage on my rental contract…

Nobody will ever know the truth.

The following weekend, I made a trip to my favorite local Hispanic-owned used tire peddler, where the tires are stacked high and haphazardly. These nice folks also know me well at this point since I keep showing up with terrible van after terrible van. I had to replace three of the tires (the passenger front and both rears) because I was concerned about how much they were flaking apart in my hands.

This was a good chance to actually see the difference between a real Ford dual rear wheel axle setup and Vantruck’s fake dually conversion. That’s right, for the longest time, Centurion didn’t use a true DRW axle because Ford didn’t make the > 8500 pound GVWR cutaway van chassis yet. Vantruck has dually spacers, front and back!

This makes its front track very slightly narrower than the factory dually setup here. But it seems like that makes all the difference when it comes to fitting on the U-Haul tow dolly.

On the rear axle, the drum brakes are wider, there are more leaf springs, and the aftermarket ambulance upfit also added airbags. This is a 11,000 pound gross weight chassis based on the door sticker. Vantruck, in comparison, has a 9,900 pound label (probably for regulatory reasons) and the heaviest GVWR stock non-cutaway van of the time was 8,500 pound.

The most notable feature of this abomination is the homemade tow rig sticking out the back. It’s a vernacular attempt at a hook-and-sling wrecker, as far as I could tell. The body is entirely made of 1/4″ thick diamond-plate steel welded (WELDED) to the frame with 1/2″ thick plates and 1/4″ thick angle irons. WELDED. This whole thing was rigid!

The Towing Empennage was held in with bolts and backed up by these chain binders which appeared to brace it further up the bed. I’m guessing it’s removable for hauling or picking up scrap metal, and attached whenever it has to go recover a WE PAY $$$$ FOR JUNK CARS subject.

Just like an old-school tow truck, it was run by a winch and cable instead of hydraulics. This is just a 12,000 pound off-road winch, bolted to the body. It still worked if hooked up – I winched up the tow bar so it wasn’t at Stab Everyone In The Face height by gently tapping a battery with alligator clips to it.

Overall, I respected the builder. As I said, it was clearly a vernacular attempt at making a utility vehicle for a job at hand. There was nothing that I found outright wrong or incorrectly made. Really! Someone had a appreciable learned-on-the-fly understanding of structures and the strength of materials. The welding was messy, but all solid looking.

It’s not how I would have done it if you told me “Make a tow truck that’s also a flatbed that’s also a shitty cut up ambulance”. But it’s how someone did it, and the sheer effort put into crafting a singular and unique tool like this is something I can bro-nod at.

Via my terrible vehicle chat groups, this object was christened Econocrane, for being made from a Ford Econoline chassis and having a crane sticking out the back.

As I said up top, while the mechanical and fabrication skills needed to bang something like this together is more common, the electrical complement is not. This is the level of spaghetti wiring that was prevalent throughout the cabin and towards the rear here. I had to chase these dragons upstream a little to find the original van tail light and body lighting harness.

That’s because it didn’t really have any taillights to speak of. I ordered these “Generic Truck Combination Light” units and bolted them to the side of the bed so I could at least drive it places.

In this photo: A tow truck that is doing useful work, and a tow truck that is ???????!!!!!!

As expected, Econocrane was slow. The immensely heavy all-steel bed and empennage made it feel somehow slower than Snekvan when I got it running, almost Murdervan-tier with its older 3 speed transmission. Driving it was very binary – it was pretty much either full beans or nothing, also a common sentiment among vintage diesel owners. I never took it over a truck scale, but I was betting this was north of 7500 pounds given all the 1/2″ and 1/4″ steel plates making up the back half.

Speaking of, the transmission also seemed to be on the way out, as it needed a few seconds to think and build up pressure or something if it ever was taken out of Drive. It also had a habit of holding first gear forever then smashing into second or third. Definitely a rebuild core if I ended up sacrificing this thing.

I took Econocrane around town and to the lab a few times because… hey, why not scare your coworkers some more!? I also took it back to the junkyard I THOUGHT might have been responsible for it. They denied all knowledge of it ever existing.

Sus. To be fair, there are probably a half dozen scrap yards around here and the seller couldn’t remember where he got it from, only pointed thattaway.

At one point, I followed the cab wiring around to see if I could get the sirens to turn on again. Unfortunately these sirens ended up being just big loudspeakers, not the self-contained kind. So they needed the controller, which had been ripped out long ago.

If a Ford van chassis is impossible to service, then an ambulance integration piled on top of it is basically needing quantum entanglement to change a fuel filter. These ambulance builds usually add a lot more wiring, switches, lights, etc. and this one in particular had several runs of underhood heavy-gauge power wiring added, including a master shutoff and a current shunt (seen top center above the grille).

Heavy wiring also extended out the former cab back, presumably to an inverter to supply house power to the “ambulance” bit. A big electrical distribution box was placed under the driver’s seat which fanned these wires out from the engine bay feeder. Coolant and A/C hoses also were greater in number than a typical van since the box would have needed climate control. On top of all that, there were controls for the air suspension.

I continue to maintain Ford never intended for anyone to “service” these things so much as run up the 50-80K miles in a fleet before problems start appearing and then sell it down the river. To me. All of them.

It’s turbo time!

Econocrane was funny to have as an object for a few weeks, but beyond being visually interesting, it was just another 1991 IDI chassis much like Snekvan was. By July, Snekvan had long been knocked down and taken by the methy scrap man, with all of the turbo parts stashed. I began wondering if it was worth putting a second prototype together.

This would allow me to start clean and basically see if I could put my own “turbo kit” together and what issues I’d encounter with an from-scratch install. Snekvan had been built very incrementally and there wasn’t really a data package or installation notes besides whatever I scribbled in my notebook. Because I wasn’t sure if I could even manage the swap project, the plan for Vantruck all along as been to perform the swap first, then install my setup, instead of doing it all at once.

Econocrane therefore became an opportunity to refine the design and process. So I challenged myself: Could I do the full install in a weekend?

Let’s begin. First, I removed the PCV valve (or CDR, or the ham can…) in preparation to turn it around. The PCV has to be attached to a source of atmospheric air or mild suction instead of boost pressure, so it can’t point directly into the intake manifold any more.

I used an expanding pipe plug to block off the vent hole. Snekvan simply used a rubber grommet silicone glued in place.

The CDR turnaround bracket was reused in full from Snekvan, including the heavy hydraulic hose stumps used to convert the flush output hole into something I can put a breather hose in.

Snekvan just had the glow plug controller hanging randomly wherever, but I went ahead and formalized the measurements and made a bracket out of aluminum that will let the glow plug controller bolt in slightly lower. This was one of the points of improvements I sought to make, as one of the problems for people turbocharging the IDI is always repositioning this glow plug controller.

A lot of creative solutions involving valve covers and extension brackets exist, but I was hoping I could escape the worst of the engine bay cramming with my approach. This bracket makes it so that no wire cutting/extending has to happen.

I just twisted the harness around to face the other way, and bolted it in.

The turbos and downpipes were already made for Snekvan, so installing these two was quick and painless. The same main oil gallery spigot on the driver’s side rear corner of the engine block was used for the turbo oil feed.

I routed remaining segments of the “slinky hose” from the turbo outputs up to the engine bay. On the right, it follows the transmission dipstick. On the left, the auxiliary (rear) heater hoses act as a guide. Vantruck does not have these hoses so I’ll have to figure out another way to constrain it.

Notice the left hose is black and the right is orange. The left one is made of neoprene, which is not oil resistant. I just had it standing around and decided to use it instead of buying more silicone hose. This would prove to be a mistake as it melted after a while, so later on it was replaced with more orange silicone hose.

In one morning/lunch period, the turbos were installed and hoses run. Not bad so far!

Up at the front of the engine, I made another turbo oil return assembly by drilling a panel-mount barb fitting into the timing gear inspection cover.

I decided to go for broke right away and cranked up the fueling on the injection pump all the way. I think it was around 1.5 turns of the Magic Hog Cranking Screw before I felt it stop fully.

Here is the finished “upstairs” integration with the Onyx intake adapter curing. The wastegate actuator hoses are also installed.

With the afternoon progressing, I went on a quest to collect basically every 2.5 inch exhaust pipe in a couple mile radius. I had to mate the turbo outputs to the funny dual stacks and I wasn’t going to do it very professionally.

I recovered the exhaust system I banged together for Snekvan, including the “Trumpet of Shame”, to reuse the output flanges and most other parts.

I’ll be honest, putting this exhaust adapter setup together took longer than installing the everything else. There were several awkward turns to make because of where the stacks are positioned. Also, I never really took a photo of them… but the 5″ diameter exhaust stacks are welded to a 5-to-4 inch adapter, which is welded to a 4-to-3 inch adapter, which is welded to a 3-to-2.5 inch adapter before making the turn.

This was simply more impetus to keep Vantruck’s eventual exhaust system to 3 inch tractor stacks or Corvette side pipes or something.

And here we are, both sides finished on a Sunday mid afternoon.

The last step of it all before bootup was wiring in the oil bilge pump into the ignition circuit. I used the same Key-on/Run circuit as Snekvan, though for Vantruck I want to figure out how to use the Accessory circuit or a timer relay so it doesn’t keep cycling the glow plugs.

Overall, I felt pretty validated that the “turbo install” will go smoothly. I specifically wanted to avoid invasive surgery as one of the requirements of the project, and I think this was accomplished. I only really had to drill 1 hole for the oil return fitting, and everything else cutting-shaping-grinding related was just fitting that exhaust up. I’m not aiming to ever sell these things as kits because my target market would be like 7 people (But we care… very much…) but hey, it’s contributing to the knowledge and shitpost base!

Alright! It’s time to go test drOH MY GOODNESS this thing is far quicker than it should ever be. It was a relatively low mile engine with great compression (it never failed to light off with what felt like less than one crank rotation). The Magic Hog Cranking Screw was bottomed out, and the wastegates were left from Snekvan at about 15 PSI (I never put the boost gauge back in to verify). I was easily contesting the interstate at-will, and the straight-piped exhaust stacks shooting out bald eagles and airstrikes whenever I went to pull out to pass simply added the corn-syrup-candied cherry to the whole experience.

This was truly an OBNOXIOUS, MENACING machine.

I tried dailying it a few times and just couldn’t stand the exhaust noise. This was good to confirm, because Vantruck definitely needs mufflers now. The deafening booming got old real fast. On top of that, my opinion is that a straight-piped IDI engine actually sounds like garbage. I’m not sure what property of the firing order or manifold design causes it, but they sound like they have a skip or missing cylinder.

One thing I noticed was that the weenie little “clicker’ fuel pump it came with just couldn’t keep up with the fuel demand any more. I’d have plenty of fueling for the first few seconds… then it felt like it runs out of steam. Friends told me to get a high-volume fuel pump and pressure regulator, and so I grabbed a gently used Holley vane pump off the orbiting cruft cloud of eBay, along with a matching regulator.

The regulator is quite important because fuel inlet pressure strongly affects the timing inside the distributor pump, and too high an inlet pressure basically causes it to lock timing too far advanced and the engine runs like trash. I dialed the regulator in for 6 PSI. You’re technically supposed to re-time the engine (by shifting the distributor pump) if the inlet pressure ever changes, but meh.

Here was another good lesson learned for Vantruck: I hate this fuel pump. Being made for racing applications, it’s very loud and draws a ton of power. I think for Vantruck I’ll stick to a larger capacity Facet pump, such as the one I put on Spool Bus, maybe two in parallel

You know exactly what’s happening next.

By mid-August, with the system having built up a lot more trust from me driving it to work and randomly to meetups and events and all… There was only one place left to go.

Yep, a three hour jaunt up to my favorite proving grounds. No van of mine is fully commissioned without this last important sea trial.

Besides it being thunderously loud the entire way there and back, I didn’t have a single problem. This is quite encouraging for the Vantruck build.

Econocrane was another squirrel-brained adventure that turned out to be a very net positive (??????) experience. I managed to make some incremental design changes to the turbo system, and found out that it installed from scratch very painlessly. I then ended up with a machine that was the very embodiment of American excess: Loud and obnoxious, menacing and antisocial, fuel-guzzling and emissions-spewing, built by one or more people with their hands and only one brain cell between them all. A rented brain cell.

Then I proceeded to do fuck-all with it all fall and winter. Econocrane served its purpose, so I just kept it stashed in the yard. And so, when the city came a-knocking, I decided it had to be culled.

Luckily, the Econocrane story has a happy ending. I was lucky to find a “wholesale buyer” in none other than the wonderful, fantastic Speedycop. The builder of many hilarious LeMons race vehicles, you probably have heard of his work if you’re knowledgeable of Car-tube and the world of shitbox racing.

Jeff and friends tripped down from his new Tennessee fortress and took Econocrane off my hands along with the two Citicar cheese wedges, which I’ve been sitting on since spring ’21 without a single post about. He has plenty of plans for these things, so stay tuned to his channel and page! Econocrane in particular will be a drivetrain donor for a terrifying new build he wants to do, which I’ll happily race with Vantruck because hopefully we’ll finish up around the same time.

The funny thing is, the Speedycop Walled City is located mere minutes from the Tail of the Dragon. With how many times a year I tend to end up there, it was almost like having a custody sharing agreement. I occasionally dropped by to say hello to the children:

On the next episode of Big Chuck’s Backlogged Vans: A quick return to robots as I took Sadbot to a heavyweight sportsman’s style tournament in Houston. Yeah, 2022 was an absurdly intense year! i”LL fInAlLy LeArN To rELaX AnD ChIlL OuT