Team Mauser

Strike Anywhere

Strike Anywhere	Reports 0-4	Reports 5-7
.	Strike Terror- Season 4	.
Progress Report 1 Getting parts together	Progress Report 2 Building the Chassis	Progress Report 3 Installing the Drivetrain
Progress Report 4 Electronics	Progress Report 5 Armor	Progress Report 6 Weapon
Season 4 Event Pictures	Post Event Analysis	.
.	Strike Terror - Season 5	.
Up from the Ashes	Motor Mounts and Pods	Column and Drivetrain
Fork and Wheel	Skirts and Guards

Progress Report 5 - Not Much Progress (8/11-8/24/01)

The Motor mount was done August 10th. But frankly, I was running out of capacity to do things with the basement shop in the condition it was, plus there were things around the house that HAD to be done. So here's a bit of screwing around, plus a lot of time cleaning up the shop. I mean a LOT.

The painters had finished the house, but the garden was non-existent. I pulled up all the old rocks and built this planter with some of the railroad ties the Previous Idiot left in the back yard (Still have 3 or 4 more). Then rather than overplanting, I put in three Rhododendrons, which will get a lot bigger, and a row of Pansies, half of which are doing well, and a few of which are very unhappy flowers. Gardening not Zathras' skill. To give you an idea. The whole top floor is where I live. The garage and "Basement" level is dedicated to the shop.

I do NOT have a problem. I can quit any time I want. I just don't want to....

On the 16th, I took delivery of three more CW EV's from MECI, for hammer drives, and 6 Colsons and Hubs from CruelRobots.com. Note those three extra bushings came in handy.

This room is the right side of the basement, from front to back (Shot from the front and the back). I wish I had "Before" pictures to show you, but basically, the room was full of boxes and stuff. Totally unusable. I couldn't get any work on the Bot done because of the order of things I had to do. I had to get a metalworking machine, but before I could do that, I had to build a table for it. Before I could build a table, I was going to have to get the shop in order, and before I could get the shop in order, I had to clear out all the rest of the crap. With all the boxes of papers, and odds and ends, I was stunned that I got it all done in about a week or so.

Saturday, the 18th, I allowed myself an indulgence, and I picked up the two Metal Mechanics toys available at the local Target. I was tempted to to a build report about how I built TWO BattleBots in one evening. One problem these otherwise extremely cool toys have is that the axle bolts appear to have been cut with a shear, which makes it impossible to thread the nuts on them. I had to grind the ends of the bolts with a Dremel to make it possible to assemble them.

So with the workshop all squared away, towards the end of the week I got going on the table for the machine. Like all Chandlers, I tend to build furniture to withstand nuclear attack. My Dad's bookshelves will be heirlooms. This was built to hold up a 500+ pound machine. The table doesn't actually rest on the 4x4's. The weight is put on the horizontal 2x4 feet. The 5' long supports are held up by the 2x4 cross piece, which is let into a dado in all the legs. The legs are spaced based on the published dimensions of the machine so that all the weight is directed downward directly through the legs (So the beams might be overkill in the middle.). Two layers of 3/4" ply help spread the load, and a layer of Masonite makes it pretty, for now. Don't expect THAT to last. In the background of one of the shop pictures you can see my ultimate router table. There's a photo-story of how I built that here. I used that to make extremely precise cuts, and every piece of wood was jointed and planed. All of the joints are held with polyurethane glue. When I set this down on the floor, it didn't rock or move or make a sound. It is rock solid.

Friday, August 24th, I finally broke down and went after the machine (I'd been saying I might get it as early as Tuesday on the Forum, but the table wasn't ready, and frankly, if anything is going to sink this project, it's my tendency to put off big purchases as long as possible. A legacy of living paycheck to paycheck in the past, I guess. This picture also shows off the UniStrut tie-down system I welded into the van. Cargo stays put!

And what's a machine without tooling?

It took four hours to get this from the van in the driveway to here, with the help of two neighbors to get it through the garage entry door. I rented a giant engine hoist, and because of clearance issues, I had to remove the milling head to get it out of the van. This by the way, is in the part of the basement behind the garage, not the part in the shop pictures. Hey, maybe one day I will get that drywall up. But not until I get around to running the network wire and the 220 lines. I thought I'd be doing that this summer, but it's only two more months to the next Competition, and these walls have been unfinished since the house was built. They can wait a little longer.

Progress Report 6 - I actually DO stuff on the bot! (8/27/01)

Zinc Galvanizing is bad for welding, and I can't imagine it makes machining any easier. Fortunately, a little Hydrochloric acid will take away the Zinc, leaving you with nice bare steel.

All I did was use the acid, and then run the pipe under the wire brush, and look at the difference!

And here we are! The whole reason I needed a machine, and the whole reason I was pretty well blocked for two weeks. I needed a part to go in the hammer, and I didn't need the machine shop to do it. This is my very first turning!

All that, for this. The finish was improved by holding a file on it while in the lathe, then a light grinding on a 60 grit white stone, and some emery compound on a buffing wheel. Lot of work? Maybe, but since an oil seal rides on this, smooth is good.

See it in there? It holds the bearing in place. Using an inboard seal on the outboard side leaves the end of the shaft free for support.

And speaking of that, after drilling the end of the shaft, I tapped it for a 1/2-13 bolt. Doing it in the lathe allows me to support the end of the tap with the center (the tap has a hole), and to use a "Cheater" bar to turn the tap, while keeping it straight. Strangest thing happened though. When I hit bottom, BOTH handles of the tap wrench went >ping< simultaneously. Damned if I can figure that one out.

Remember that example of trying to use the end mill in the drill press with the cross-slide vice? (PR4) Well this is what it's like when practicing on the milling machine. The smoothest cut comes from taking multiple passes. This is also an example of how to calculate the number of turns to get the slot length you want. (Slot overall length = 1/8" * number of turns of the crank + diameter of the cutter. If cutter diameter = bolt diameter, don't count the cutter diameter to equal the amount you can slide the bolt.)

Testing out methods of cutting the necessary motor mount slots. The big hole, boring all the way through (At an angle) and then hogging out the whole slot in one shot. A little uneven. The narrow slot, smaller end mill, very light passes.

When the only tool you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you've got a G9729, look out world! Here I'm working on motor mount parts. I cut the angle iron to size with my chop saw, but I got a little silly deciding to make all the ends EXACTLY square and 3" long. Tip, set the vice so that the end being flush with the side of the vice gets you the 3" you want. Then all the parts are guaranteed to be the same length. Definitely overkill for something that's going to be WELDED. First casualty, my 1/8" end mill. Damn! That was perfect for the band clamp slots! Need to find a tooling shop in town ASAP!

Progress Report 7 - Built a sucky weapon - (8/28 -9/5/01)

Here I'm cutting angled slots for the hose clamps in the motor mounts. I broke two 1/8" end mills doing this. THEN I learned that I was running them WAY too slowly. The guy at Grizzly, Doug Dixson, who has been incredibly helpful both when I bought the machine and on the trip up to buy more end mills, not only made me a copy of a wonderful chart of diameter vs surface feet per minute to get RPM, but he LAMINATED it so it would hold up in the shop. Important point. You don't slow down because they're delicate, you speed up because they're scaled down. There actually wasn't too much progress in the opening days of this report, with the broken end mills. The first came with that set I bought and tried to use in the drill press. Then I bought an expensive one at a shop in Seattle. It didn't last any longer than the Chinese one. I theorized that the best defense against breaking any more would be to buy five of them. So I went up to Grizzly, bought five (And some other stuff), and thanks to that speed chart, I haven't broken any more.

The mounts are adjustable by two bits of angle iron sliding within one another. But since the inside corner is radiused, the outside corner of the inner rail needs to be cut off.

You can see how they fit better. Here I drilled through both parts with an end mill, later, I'd use the hole to line up for the slots. I pretty much burned out the 1/4" end mill cutting these slots. I got too busy doing them to take any pictures of the process.

I also bought a sandblasting cabinet that frankly has a sucky door sealing problem. Duct tape helps, but the stuff STILL finds a way out and the outlet air filter clogs almost instantly. Here are all the parts for three motor mounts, and you can see the long parts are sandblasted.

This is the assembled and welded mount. What's missing from this is the end pieces which will have a screw adjustment to set the tension. You don't think I was gonna depend on the tension of the bolts in the slots to keep the motor tight, did you? Oh, and this doesn't show the hose clamps installed, but the angled slots really help.

I started with the theory that if you can't bore the holes, buy them. 1-1/8" grade 8 washers have a 1-1/4" hole, which just about fits on the spindle. But not exactly, so I ended up trimming them out.

This was my first experiment cutting a circle out of a piece of 3/16" steel. It looks good here, but it was a failure as an operation on the lathe. But I learned a lot. Also nearly ruined my tailstock doing it, but that's a story for another time.

This picture is slightly misleading. The "giant washer" which is 4-1/2" across, didn't fit as the brake flange as I planned, so I made that out of another piece. But what this DOES show is that a laser printer and a centerpunch can solve a lot of your layout worries when it comes to laying out holes on a 4" bolt circle.

Line up the drill on the centerpunches, and go to town. Note, DON'T let children play with Drill Press curlies. It might be fun to challenge them to a game of "Catch the chips", especially when you say the blue ones are worth extra points, but those kids catch on real quick.

Anyway, nearly perfect fit.

So, here are all the parts for the hub and the hammer arm. The large plate needs a hole in it for the spindle.

This is the most dangerous lathe setup I've attempted. It worked pretty well though. Would have worked better with a boring bar, and lower profile clamps.

This is how the parts go together. They look really nice before I did a REALLY ugly welding job on them.

Supports for the spindle. These would, in theory, bolt to the bot Chassis.

These are the supports for the ends of the spindle. Since the tangent force on the shaft from a hammer strike would be hardest on the hammer end, one of the washers serves as a socket to prevent shearing of the bolt. The spatter was horrible. In fact, there was spatter stuck to this from the welding job on the hub, while this stuff was on the floor!

A lot of time with the grinder made this look a lot prettier. With the spindle bolted in place, it made me feel good, like all these small fiddley bits have gone into something I could show.

After getting it assembled, I realized I didn't account for the clearance of the hub. But I was desperate to test fire the weapon, so I quickly tack-welded on the prototype motor mount and wired this up. With no hammer arm installed, the thwack it generated was most impressive. Unfortunately, the next day with a 3' length of square tubing installed, the performance was less than pathetic. Plus, this entire assembly weighs 45 lbs. WAY too much. Time to start re-engineering. A shorter arm is a lot peppier, and there is an issue with a rub that is probably robbing power, but still, a 1.5' long hammer in a HW is NOT going to be impressive.

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