Creamy Robot Goodness

So progress is coming along very slowly on Gunther, but it does continue. I’ve now completed the 6 aluminum axles that will transmit the torque from the two motors, through the pulleys, to the e-Maxx (remote-controlled monster truck) universal shafts. (Seen here with ball bearings, pulleys, and snap rings, and attached to the universal shaft.) I turned down the ends of the aircraft aluminum rods, and Chris helped me use his milling machine to cut some flats. (Man, I want a milling machine… CIM-101 should be fun, hopefully it’ll work out.) The robot’s design is such that even if all 4 belts were to simultaneously fail, each side of the robot would still have one powered drive wheel. As an aside, I LOVE retaining rings (aka snap rings). This was the first time I’ve installed them on anything of mine (using the lathe, of course), and they are a wonderful solution. Beats cotter pins!

The lathe is pretty cool. I was messing around with some spare 1/2″ solid plastic rod (PTFE?) and made a tiny little container. The press-on cap makes a nice “pop!” sound when you remove it quickly. It’s actually pretty cool… As soon as I get a new chuck key for the tailstock I want to try and make another one. The next one will have a cap that’s exactly the right size to hold one gram of 4F black powder, and a hole so it can be worn on a cord like a necklace. Perfect for dispensing ejection charges at the launch pad.

Still haven’t gotten either of the RC trucks that I won off eBay, so I can’t do too much low-level designing, but I’ve been chugging along anyway. Built the guts of a hot-wire foam cutter this weekend. My floor is covered in little scraps of foam now, that thing is so cool and so much fun to play with. Built most of a small (9″ square) vacuform table, too. Should come in handy (not to mention looking a little nicer than my original pizza box version) [some results from pizza box experiments].

Image: work-in-progress, a design for Gunther. (For reference, the wheels are about 5.75″ diameter, and the robot is about 18″ wide.) Lots of things are missing (the tires have no wheels, there are no drive belts or shafts yet, etc), mostly because I’m still waiting for parts to come so I can measure them. This is what I’d love for Gunther to resemble, though. Learned a little about painting camouflage today from this place, this picture uses the “snow – temperate with open terrain” color scheme.

I feel like such a little kid. This is *exactly* the sort of stuff that I always dreamed about doing when I was little.

Now I’m entertaining the idea of enlarging, say, two of the rails on the multi-rail rocket pod, to be big enough to support a minimum diameter 29mm rocket. That way at least two of the rockets could potentially be high-power (a small H, like the one I got for Jujucee). That may be too large for such a small robot, but it’s fun to think about.

UPDATE 12-20-05: I got the first truck, and the second should arrive shortly. I think I’ll definitely have to put stiffer springs on the suspension, and even then it’ll probably be on the heavy side. Still waiting for the composite board (a 1/4″ sandwich of fiberglass laminate around a nomex honeycomb core — this is officially The Stuff), which I’ll be using for the baseplates. They did bill me yesterday, so with some luck it won’t be much longer.