Motorama to Now-ish: During and After the Event

Alright, so lots to cover

First, Motorama

So this is the Bone Dead Robotics squad rolling up into Motorama. The shell in the back their is the chassis of CATAPULT (6lb Mantisweight) that never competed, but I always bring for the coolness factor of being a full shell made by the greatest machine shop everr. The usual suspects, PK v2, WoD v3, and Ferocious Mk. IV are all in the middle before any carnage has befallen it yet. I also brought the chassis of the original Weta clone PK came from. I originally wasn't going to bring it until I got.....a premonition...about it that said I would need it for......reasons....

The competition began with the Antweight tournament. Ferocious faced Puppy which was a member of the Collective family but wanted a solo career (like a certain Mayn Zalik). As the video shows, both robots were incredibly speedy, but the low lip and lifter secured the W. 

With our luck of course, this meant bad things were to happen.

As a result, Ferocious faced off against the super-dominant-ultra-strong-king-of-the-insect-bots Vile Ant. But instead of getting trashed.......

THIS. THE THING HAPPENED GUYS. THE THING.

Yep, in one of the luckiest shots I have ever seen, Vile Ant chucked Ferocious into the one place in the box that it really couldn't recover from: the gap on the side of the arena with the giant bill of the lifter literally all the way through it thus creating a complete and inescapable face plant. Murphy's Law wins again.

Here is Vile Ant getting removed from the box after posing with the newly faceplanted Ferocious. After this, Ferocious fought against Poco Tambor who is one of the most solid and formidable competitors today. Another oh-so-lucky draw I know.

The fight was pretty close at first, but gradually the drum caught the edge of the lifter and made it impossible to get under so in the end it was just a matter of seeing whether or not it would break. Overall, no damage to the chassis was given. A few chips in the front UHMW was all that there was. Unfortunately, the lifting servo was messed up a little bit, but this didn't become apparent until after it got hit by Klazo of Near Chaos Robotics/Chaos Corp (the drum). Ultimately, I love this little guy because its base is incredibly rugged and the weapon is pretty solid. I don't see much change necessary for it besides cleaning up the edge of the lifter. 

Oh look, bigger me! This is Revenge of Dr. Super Brain who is a 3lb lifter. As it can be seen, these two bots are basically the same only adjusted to weight class. Super Brain is older though so he gets the "originality points." Anyway, on to the main competition!

Here's a pretty picture courtesy of Pete Smith of Kitbots allowing us to use little studio he brought with him to record robots at the event.

Another pretty one!

A-not-as-pretty-as-before-but-could-be-worse one!

WoD v3 was the first one up, against Mombot (seen below)

I knew that I was immediately disadvantaged because the style of this robot is too high. LOOK AT THOSE HEARTS AND BUTTERFLIES, In all seriousness though, this robot is very sturdy. It is made of a UHMW unibody with about .5in protection at each portion and a .063in Grade 5 Titanium wedge. It's pretty indestructible. However, the main problem emerged from speed. You see, WoD was the test mule for the fusion gearmotor between the Kitbots 1000RPM gearmotor and the Banebots RF-370 motor (which may or may not be out of stock). The reason for this is that the original motors that come with the 1000RPMs are considerably less durable than the Banebots so it improved reliability. Additionally, the Banebots run on a nominal 7.2V which means that when overvolted at 14.8V (4s Lipo) it will spin at high speed. Note: When overvolting motors make sure that it is properly cooled otherwise it will burn up, demagnetize or some other catastrophic event. Moving on, WoD v3 lost its first match due to two main problems:

• The lifting arm's face was too floppy

The other front two sets of screws were unfortunately ruined as a result of the tap breaking off in one and the other not being completely bored through.as a result, the top screws ended up serving as pivot points since they were the only point of contact between each arm and the front face. 

• The pinion on the shaft of the BB 370 moved while it was operating

While constructing the combination I decided to use high-strength Red Loctite to secure the shaft to the pinion. However, I discovered at Moto that this isn't good for the "sleeve" type bond that is in play. While the red holds it tight as possible, there is still a large enough gap between the shaft and pinion which means that it doesn't have those tight friction forces which provide most of the force to keep it in place. As a result, the continued trauma in the spinning directions (i.e. going forward and backward) the red was forced to burden more than it should so it snapped. Upon additional research, I discovered that the Loctite 640 "Green" compound is designed for sleeve relationships and, once applied, makes everything all good again :)

Unfortunately, this knowledge didn't help me at the moment since I still had no way to help it. So, I threw some classic 1000RPMs into it and prepared to fight Scrambles the Death Dealer.

A little moment for Scrambles.

Scrambles has been a de facto eternal rival for BDR as it has competed against both Play'n Krazy v.1 and El Destructo. In all cases, it has been a frenemy relationship where we both just want the beat the crap out of each other.

Back to the fight! WoD could only really just drive around. Being a pulley-driven 4WD robot it meant that it basically only has the power of a 2WD robot but with more stability (longer wheelbase) and drag (more tires to move). As such, without any super powerful drive motors it becomes a weak pushy bot whose job was to bear the carnage. Which is exactly what happened until Scrambles managed to reach under the wedge and lightly slap the receiver which turned it off. As a result, WoD was out of the tournament but the all 5/16" 7075 Aluminum chassis with .06" Grade 5 Titanium held up fine. The base chassis is super strong and completely undamaged so I'm going to build off of that later.

Now for PK!

Well, PK got wrekt. Like SUPer wrekt.

Like

That wrekt. 

• Ripped the left nutrstip out of the UHMW sides
• Bent the thin lip of the Grade 5 .063" Ti wedge
• Bent the aluminum baseplate hard
• And shattered the receiver case

Good Lord it was wrekt despite all my hopes and dreams :'(

But remember how I mentioned that auspicious feeling of bringing the old chassis? Well looks like someone upstairs was looking out because now I had a pre-designed and guaranteed combat-survivable chassis! With the support of Frederick Moore,who had BEST KOREA and Gracious Pipefessionalism, having great sportmanship in giving me a new weapon ESC (the other smoked out after its wires got crossed or something during impact) I was able to rebuild the whole thing in less than 20mins. 

Despite my best efforts, the Weta design never failed to return anyway. My hat is off to you Pete Smith! Anyways, the fight went well until the Afro kinda went crazy and disabled my control probably as a result of the receiver being browned out by it or something. The left drive motor had one of its ESC wires broke and the right had the motor completely separate from the gearbox which left it dead in the water. All in all, back to the drawing board for PK! Now its time to resurrect El Destructo...