Quick note: I re-organized how the individual project threads were categorized on the left sidebar. Yeah, “Done!” and “Not Done!” stopped being useful some time in 2009… But hey, the best time to make a change was 15 years ago and the second best time is now. Everyone’s grouped by type of build, whether it be van or robot or silly scooter. My next insurmountable multi-year sit down for an hour challenge is to update the static pages and make new ones.
Many moons ago, I finished a Stance Stance Revolution. I did in fact go to Motorama right after the fact, even if I’m years late with the event update! In fact, another entire Motorama is happening right this moment, but I’m sitting this one out due to having focused too much on Real Life and the Robot Trap House, not getting around to putting either SSR or Susquehanna Boxcar back together yet.
So, after Vantruck’s “redemption trip” in 2022, and doing a clean in-and-out with Coronavan in 2023 due to surrounding life and work obligations, it was obviously time to debut Operation IDIoc….
Nope, guess who hasn’t been above the Mason Dixon line since 2019? I decided it was Mikuvan’s turn to make the run back up to my weird culturally adopted second home (as my friends joke all the time that I’m a closeted central Pennsylvanian).
At this point in time, I hadn’t yet trusted Vantruck enough to make the long trip to Harrisburg. In retrospect? It would have been just fine. But I decided risking it at the time wasn’t worth the cascading costs – see, at least the Tail of the Dragon was within one AAA tow radius, and with Mikuvan they don’t have to send out a different truck after finding out the first one was too small despite me telling them exactly what it is.
Somewhere north of Roanoke, stopping both for lunch and to peruse the hardware store for stuff I forgot to bring, such as….
… a weapon lock for Stance Stance. I grew fond of using these big D-style hitch pins after doing it for Sadbot for Comicpalooza. I just got one big enough to thread through both discs at once. Bringing it into the store and test fitting pins one by one definitely drew a lot of conversation, and there were even some BB watchers!
The rest of the trip was completely uneventful, which is an abnormality given Mikuvan’s history of enjoying the Shenandoah Valley scenery just a bit too much. I cruised into Harrisburg around dinner time and got my usual hotel room at “whoever still has vacancy and not bugs”.
Here we go! It’s Saturday morning and everything’s passed inspection. I got to drive it in the real arena surface it’ll be on, and I confirmed that the worm drive was a surprisingly good idea. Weapon spinup was rapid, a consequence of me designing more for torque than raw speed because I’ll likely be using these things as reaction wheels often.
The only issue was the roughly 3mm of ground clearance. That was not something I could make better on the fly here, but I figured I’d use the weapons as said reaction wheels if it got hung up briefly.
The first fight was against a two-part multibot, two little TPU bricks working together named BDT. Not to be confused with Jamison’s legendary DDT. The fight is at 1:54:40 in the day 1 beetle stream.
This was an endurance fight, and SSR didn’t endure that well. It spent much of the time (as designed) bouncing around the arena on the blades, but either that or one of the hits caused a weapon motor shaft to break off.
If I had to guess, something bent just enough that the gear’s hub got caught on the disc. This was something I had thought may happen because the gear hub sits outside of the swept circle of the blade’s hub, so it could in principle hit the spokes. A lot of gear-driven weapons make sure the blade hub is a little larger than the center axis of the pinion for this reason, but I didn’t have the weight this time around to make the blade hub larger in diameter. Something else will have to give here.
The other weapon broke down because one of the motor wires got loose and was minced by the gear drive or blade. That’s just first-fight debugging finding all the ways you didn’t zip tie everything like you thought you did.
Knocking down the weapon drive system was quick, allowing me to assess the roots of the damage. I think the two-piece motor and weapon shaft mount (that bracket) might still be just a little too flexible, so maybe I can redesign it with the carbon fiber plate also covering part of the area to increase rigidity and unify things more too.
Because I didn’t want to sacrifice a spare weapon motor yet, I simply retrieved the shaft from one of the spare drive motors (of which I had more) and smashed it together again and sent it.
And send it did. SSR died a valiant warrior’s death against Mulsanne, a P1 beetle with a scorpion’s tail style spinning disc. This video is at 4:36:32 in the stream capture. This was a fight full of knocking chunks off each other until Mulsanne lined up the best possible killshot and cut through the 1mm carbon fiber baseplate and 3 out of 4 cells of the battery!
I honestly think I hit him more off-kilter and upside-down than driving on all 4 wheels. One of the weapons died about midway through, leaving me to actually take myself seriously and use the remaining disc as a reaction wheel to turn and drive for the last 30 something seconds.
Oof. What a way to go through. SSR skating around identifying as an undercutter or gyro walker for much of the time somehow made the whole affair worth it. I have enough spares to put this thing back together as-is, but am going to make some mods to the weapon designs as I mentioned earlier.
Not too sure what as of yet, since the thing is so packed full of gear that there is scant little to just remove weight from. Plus, I’m not sure how much thicker of a baseplate could have stopped that weapon anyway. It might be better to just trim some beef from the weapon hubs and go for reliability changes. Just don’t get hit, duh.
On my way back down, I decided to detour after staying a night near Roanoke again. This time, I went back through a different portion of western North Carolina to explore some roads that I wanted to visit, but because the east-of-Asheville area is a little long for a day trip, haven’t gotten to.
I do need to just spend a week wandering the whole place. I keep saying that, but am very bad at actually putting things down and doing it. Hence my recurring mention of day trips here and there.
It turns out the ass end of Route 197 isn’t paved, but no big deal. With excellent sightlines down the mountain, I just played some Rally Van Simulator.
A friend somewhere at the bottom of the mountain before I found my way back to US 74.
The ship landed some time after midnight Monday into Tuesday, upon which I neglected to unload any of the robots or gear for a solid week. No issues at all out of Mikuvan this time (which I again emphasize how unnatural this is and may indicate a credit line building for a future epic road trip explosion), except maybe the new radiator I installed the year before was too effective. I may have to check the thermostat and see if it’s stuck open some.
These events transpired right before I turned my attention to Vantruck to finish “Patch 1.1” and hit the Tail of the Dragon in April. So I spent a bunch of time after that in post project hangover mode, not touching a robot again until August in preparation for Dragon Con.