The Restoration of Overhaul 1: Wait, Why Did We Do It That Way Again?

Last November, I made a trip back up to Boston in order to retrieve some of the heavy things I didn’t bring down when I moved. One of these heavy things I explicitly wanted to get was the hulk of Overhaul 1, which had traveled with me out of MIT, through the Artisan’s Asylum, into the Old New Shop, finally to the New New Shop.

There it is, in the cruft corner of the New New Shop. When the wheel modules went into sadbot back in 2015, the shuffle drive pods were put back in as a visual completion piece. The motors were removed for future other bots – I believe those drive motors might have made it into the Season 2 Road Rash. While they were never used in the Season 1 competition, they were the last piece of the purposeful “Glue 3 designs together” approach we used for Overhaul 1, and the focus of a lot of effort during the build.

Beyond missing a few motors, the bot was exactly in the state it left the Nightmare and Witch Doctor rumble of Season 1.

This was the same trip that I acquired the Benchmaster, Master of Benches on the way up. I somehow managed to fill the back of Coronavan up without even trying. Thus is my life, apparently.

And thus, the conference of heavyweight robots is convened! The still unpainted Overhaul 3 is in the background. As I’ll expound on in its build reports coming some day soon, part of the design mantra was getting back to the roots of what I liked about Overhaul 1. I wanted Overhaul 3 to drive like Sadbot – as a result, I wanted it to drive like OH1. That meant going back to large, bouncy wheels over the old Biohazard inspired 6WD setup of Overhaul 2, and if you recall, 30Haul was made two years ago to explore the same.

My plan for Overhaul 1’s resto was to straighten the frame out so I can easily mount stuff to it again (but not repairing the battle damage!), and then putting some motors back in it. The old battery bay was to become an electronics-and-battery bay since it wouldn’t need enough energy to last a 3 minute match, just to drive around. The actuators for the lift and clamp were in fine enough shape and would just be taken apart for a quick inspection and rebuild if needed.

I began taking the thing apart and assessing what needed to be done. The right side of the frame was caved inwards from Nightmare brushing against it, for instance. This really prevented the shuffle pod on that side from being fully mounted (Its sidewall was also a little caved in, but not enough to matter apparently). Dings, dents, and nibble marks abounded on the rest of the bot.

The “pontoons” in the front warped when welding, so it was already bent anyway, but during the tournament it just ended up bending more. So I also had to figure out how to pull that straight.

I decided to force the frame apart hydraulically from the inside. Doing just enough Big Chuck’s Auto Body to have watched enough repair videos of car and truck body and frame pulls, I was out to try my sense of “understanding how the metal flows” when taking damage. Nightmare pushed the steel inwards, so pull it outwards again to compensate.

Initially, I tried with Mikuvan’s OEM tire jack. While it’s fine and enough for lifting one cheek to change a tire, against the AR400 steel plate and tube weldment, it was just… no.

And so I found myself running to Harbor Freight before closing time to get one of their big 20-ton bottle jacks. With this thing and a cleverly positioned Spool Bus Lifting Tool, I was easily able to force the frame rail back straight again by targeting the upper edge (where it got chewed first). The rest followed without much fuss.

While the tubing is crimped a little on that side now, it doesn’t matter, since all I need is the clearance. The damage is character.

I flipped the frame around to also push out the other side a little. An AR500 plate sits against the bottom of the jack and the recently corrected frame rail in order to boost its rigidity, such that I didn’t just balloon both sides of the frame outwards. I was plenty satisfied with how straightened the whole thing became, really. I didn’t expect it to work out this well!

For pulling the pontoons apart again, I had a creative method in mind. To execute this, I’d first need to weld a pull tab to the end of one of the pontoons. The idea being I’d fixture the pontoon center beam element to something relatively sturdy, and use a come-along or chain binder on…

…Yeah, what was anyone expecting? Dual vantruck metal forming.

I bolted the pontoon center member through one of the former 5th-wheel hitch mounting holes on Spool Bus, suspending it slightly off the bed by using spare Overhaul wedgelets as a spacer. This would allow the beam to deflect the other way as it was pulled. I wrapped the tow chain I keep in Vantruck around the pull tab and joined it up with itself, then attached the other end around the trailer hitch.

I then used a come-along to slowly pull on the length of chain. It looks and sounds far sketchier than it was in real life, but I made sure to use double layered eye/face protection and an few “Anti-kill-yourself” blankets over the chain and cables.

I mean, not that any of that stuff would do much against a potential flying 37 pound pointy steel thing, but it made me feel better about it!

It’s not totally straight (not that it ever was), but it’s better than before for sure. At least it’ll be straight enough to get the bolts started.

With all the frame bashing work I wanted to get done completed, I next moved on to the question of how to put motors back in it. Originally, we had just hung F30-400 Ampflow motors off the sides of the shuffle pods/wheel modules and used some tie rods to secure their back sides. This worked well enough for the time we had. I wanted to execute on an idea we bounced around but did not move on because of the extra complexity.

See, the motors I wanted to use were some XYD-13 24 volt scooter motors that I originally got as a what-if for Overhaul 3. I’m perennially of the opinion that these big ol’ scooter motors are underloved in the U.S. robot fighting scene (but rather popular overseas in the U.K. and Australia, as well as mainland Europe). Uppercut, the team of MIT ducklings from yester-season, also did very well using them for drive.

The plan was to center-mount them in the bot and use flexible couplings to connect them to the shuffle pods. Those seemingly random frame holes near the center of the bot’s wheelbase that were never populated? Well, that’s what they were originally for: Motor mounting.

This is what the arrangement will look like. The motor will drive a very short floating intermediate shaft made of spider couplings, in theory giving them a lot more isolation from the high vibration of the shuffle pods. Now I just needed a way to connect the motors together with themselves.

I decided on the fast, easy, yet effective way – use a Markforged print designed to give a little bit of rotational flex to hang the motors off the two long rails. The motors will be held together with 2 of these and standoffs as a central unit.

Here’s what the design looks like. The three holes are for the motors’s mounting flange, which will bolt through to standoffs.

And this is what it will look like in the design. The former Ampflow bolt pattern will have a small (also 3D printed Onyx) bearing block embedded in it with two flanged 1/2″ bearings to support the drive sprocket.

The design now finalized, after some adjustment of spacings here and there. The motor “pod” itself will be held in place by shaft collars, so I can make everything jiggly at first to do the side-to-side alignment before locking it in.

Fabrication of all this didn’t take too much time. So the next post installment in this “Charles really doesn’t want to start down the rabbit hole of recapping all of the Overhaul 3 content thus far” will be about getting the bot driving again!