Wasn’t that an insane season premier episode!? If you missed it, it even seems like they’re distributing the episodes in more creative ways this time, up and including Prime Video. That’s good news, including for me, who can’t be buttsed to TV like 99.5% of people near my age group and lower, and so can barely watch his own damn TV show. I’m fairly confident Overhaul will first be on the 3rd episode, so I think it will time well with the conclusion of this series.

The bulk of the physical construction took place around the first and second weeks of March. Actually, let me rewind the clocker just a little bit, back to the last weekend of February.

I got another shipment of stuff from Markforged, which is returning this season as one of the team sponsors. First, a bunch of Onyx filament to print wheel hubs with, as well as two large molds made on the Mark X series machines which have a bigger build volume. The Mark Two is limited to around 5″ in the width dimension, and guess what has 5″ wheels?! I printed a pair of 3″ front wheel molds in-house from Nylon, since that’s much smaller than the build volume limit.

Printing each pair of large wheel cores actually takes an entire day (22 hours, anyway) so it’s kind of a long process to make a dozen wheels. However, it was easy to pipeline everything once I got the prints going, as the polyurethane also happens to want about a day before demolding.

The resin of choice was Smooth-On Reoflex 60. I had plenty of good experiences with Reoflex 50 in Überclocker, but thought it wore a little fast and that Overhaul’s overpowered drivetrain would make that worse. So I elected to move up on the durometer rating, and 60A is similar to Colson wheels. I got a small pack from the local distributor around here, Reynolds, to test my process and also the amount of liquid pigment needed. See, the native color of the Reoflex resin is a pleasant ｐｏｏｐ ｂｒｏｗｎ color, which is actually too dark to turn MIKU BLUE. So whatever, black wheels it is.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how the hell these wheels are supposed to demold. The molds are one-piece with zero draft, so it should be some kind of physical impossibility…. but then you realize that is what the screwy tread profile does!

I went light on the mold release here, and subsequent wheels actually popped out easier than that. Have I mentioned it’s also awkward trying to hold a camera at the same time as keeping yourself upright AND applying several Torques to something? At least a few torques.

They didn’t all work out though. The first center wheel mold I got from Markforged seemed to have some extrusion problems for the exposed surfaces, leaving them porous. We figured I’d just try slathering on the mold release as they reprinted it.

Nah, this one was stuck for good. Later on, I actually cut this mold open and discovered the resin had seeped entirely down through the floor of the mold and even through the inner walls due to its porosity… Yup, not unscrewing this one.

The reprinted mold was fine.

The problem with a robot with much larger wheels…. is that little sample pack pretty much only lasted those three initial wheels. So guess who now owns an entire gallon of goo? There is no intemediate size between the small trial-size and the full gallon.

These buckets are kind of crappy to use without dispensing equipment setup, but luckily I managed to get the workflow down for pouring them, and only got everything slightly gooey.

All of the frame rails now have brace plate holes-to-be-tapped drilled into them, so frame reassembly can begin in parallel with the remaining operations on new drivetrain and clamp/fork parts.

The first things to go back together are the liftgear and new lift motors.

One assembled front 3″ wheel… I’m liking these already. The tread adhesion is outstanding – I can’t begin to tear the sidewall away from the face of the wheel. That and the mechanical over-molded interface means short of getting these things cut off, I’m not going to lose the tread.

A little bit more progress on reassembly, now with added drive motors.

Going on in parallel with the wheel casting and reassembly was lots and lots of welding. This damn thing almost has too much welding on it. I also know that I only say that because during this build, we didn’t have a MIG welder, only a TIG.

Here’s why – TIG welding is a very slow, methodical process which gives the welder maximum control over the weld composition. For the things we’ve been doing for “work” and consulting projects, this has been great! What it’s not good at is making large amounts of obnoxious fat welds quickly, for things which are only meant to run into each other over and over. Really, a lot of what you’ll see in the arms was designed for MIG welding, but I couldn’t gain access to my usual one back at MIT until nearly the very end of the build season. Putting Overhaul’s arms together, and Brutus’ wedges and plows, were processes which took up an entire day, or days.

The combined builds of Brutus and Overhaul made us go out and buy a MIG welder because of how bad it was. So that obviously won’t be a problem again, since now we have a Millermatic 211 in the arsenal.

However, I will begin with pointing out that a TIG welder is great for performing an act of terror I learned during my MIT career: TIG bending. Hey, it creates a highly localized heat region! By gliding the torch over a line scribed into some metal, you can very easily get it up to formability temperature. The upside is also a smaller HAZ than (in my experience) with an oxy-acetylene torch.

To make these bends in Overhaul’s future ears, I simply dumped 200 amps of TIG into them for a minute or so and then quickly threw them in the brake press. The welded-like appearance is actually very superficial and was a result of the metal surface liquefying somewhat.

The clamp side plates required some cleaning and standoff tubes machined. I actually didn’t have to buy any new tubing for this clamp design – all of it was either from some other tubular object on Overhaul, or could be slightly machined to the needed diameter. The machined tubes were advantageous since I could control the width of the assembly precisely using the turned shoulder.

SSAB’s Hardox comes with a paint-like coating instead of the heavy hot-rolled mill scale that I see a lot on generic AR grade steel. It comes off very quickly with a flap disc, whereas last season involved several hours of grinding with a solid wheel to get the material to clean weldable state.

Other weld prep included fitting the new lift hub pieces together – some diameters had to be cleaned up and shoulders turned once again.

I had to do a rather hilarious setup on the ears which connect to the clamp actuator in order to clean up the internal bore. Yep, that’s 4 out of 6 jaws.

Here I am doing the first assembly tacks on the lift hub. I have a very strange welding habit: I like doing my setup with the TIG welder, then switching to MIG to finish out. This is solely because I have no patience whatsoever for TIG.

Remember those little flats that were cut into the actuator ears and endcaps? Check out the parallels on the bottom – they help align everything so there is no complex fixturing needed.

Blah blah blah… welder and paint, grinder I ain’t, etc.

Because the clamp arm’s aluminum pivot rings still need to go over these, I had to clean the endcap welds up on the lathe afterwards.

A finished lift hub with endcaps threaded and with bearings made of oil impregnated nylon. I actually found a blank that I had machined most of to the correct dimensions, so making more was easy. I had more unfinished blanks which I machined new arm bushings for from also.

It was now Pi day, and New England greeted us with like the 3rd winter storm in 3 weeks. But the build must go on! Never give up, never surrender (seriously kids, don’t ever move up here. it’s not worth it. it’s expensive, shitty, and cold). I set out to Mid-City Steel which was able to quickly supply plasma-cut Hardox 450 parts on short notice and for very low ruble. Combined in this order are more parts for Brutus.

With this order came the first DETHPLOW (out of 2 – I entered a 2nd supplementary order for more spares) and all the arm parts too.

Plot twist: The arms are mild steel.

Yes, yes, finally obtain mythical Hardox sponsorship, end up making lifter forks from goopy mild. I was ready to design the arms to be made from HX450 also, but couldn’t help thinking if the arms were extremely rigid, that something happening to them would just take out everything upstream – the lift hub, main shaft, etc. which are decided not very Hardy or Ox-y.

Therefore, mild steel arms it is. Depending on how they perform in the season, this might be changed down the line.

Setting up the arms for welding was a similar process to everything else – chop and turn some tubes, and clamp it all together. I for one don’t mind if we bought a CNC plasma cutter. Before these industrial processes (which themselves are rather “old school” and established) were “discovered” by the robot community, welding a frame together was a much bigger deal and required much more setup and skill. This was the environment I grew up in, so that’s why it took me so long to learn and appreciate welding.

Here I am putting the arms together with our Miller 200 amp TIG in the foreground.

Hey, wait… That’s not actually me! That’s…

Allen, a new team mate for this season, who is a ‘graduated duckling’ of my involvement with New York Maker Faire and the Power Racing Series. These days, he’s a mechanical engineering student at Stony Brook. I stole him for their spring break and basically trained him from-scratch on TIG welding, upon which he somehow dumped the entire tank of argon over the course of the week.

First of all, it was a lot of welding, if I haven’t made myself clear on this front. But I do think the regulator was set up for too much gas in general, since at one point the flowmeter had something heavy run into it and did not work properly, and we set it up by listening to it. Sigmas! We have none!

(We do now have a new flowmeter)

Allen put together essentially everything you see in this build report that wasn’t the lift hub. This is a photo of the two Overhaul heads under construction. It was jigged up using the lift hub on one end and the spacers for the tooth on the other.

Your Godfather horse-head moment for this build.

Connecting all of the welded bits together was actually very painless this time. Think this means I’m getting better at design-for-welding! This is a test-fitted complete lifter assembly. Not pictured are the spare set of long arms and pair of finished short T-Rex arms. And the other lift hub. And Ｄ Ｅ Ｔ Ｈ Ｐ Ｌ Ｏ Ｗ.

Mechanical re-integration of the bot progressed quickly from this point. Check back in next week for more original content!

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