Author: Brice Farrell / Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
Have you ever hit on an idea so good the whole room bursts into laughter? Enter the cheeseburger bot …
Our BattleBots group Poor Life Choices was born of a desire to build something the world had never seen. Half the team was harboring childhood dreams of building for BattleBots, the other half was just crazy enough to try to build a combat cheeseburger for the fun of it.
Once we settled on the basic burger design we had five weeks to move from first draft to finished robot. As a first-year team thrown into a field of seasoned, multi-decade veterans, we knew we had tremendous challenges to overcome. Mistakes were made and friendships were tested. A lot of late night coffees and burgers were consumed. Many favors were asked.
A FAB TEAM
From the start Miles Pekala worked furiously to CAD up the burger components into plans that could be shared with our small groups — all Power Racing Series alums — in three cities: Oakland, Baltimore, and Chicago. In Oakland, I led the workshop at NIMBY Space where Jordan Bunker and Lindsay Oliver joined in fabrication and logistics. This group worked as the core of creation and assembly, with frequent field trips to local metal suppliers and hackerspaces.
Team Poor
Life Choices
(From left)
Charles Wittington
Jordan Bunker Lindsay Oliver
Jen Herchenroeder Miles Pekala
Jim Burke
(Not pictured)
Our teammates Charles Wittington, Brice Farrell, Jeremy Ashinghurst, and Angela Rothbaum were back east and connected by Baltimore Hackerspace. This group consulted on and machined the parts for the weapon system and kept an eye on the overall budget, asking favors at The Foundery for machining aluminum components and seeking sources of funding at every level. Of all the roles you can have on a build, team accountant is often the unsung hero.
CHALLENGES
One of the major fabrication issues was creating and aligning the pieces for the interior tube frame. Twenty-foot sections of .75″ OD (outer diameter) A513 tube steel were acquired, cut, and carried over to industrial art space M0xy and its Department of Spontaneous Combustion, where a very old and suspiciously safety-less tube roller lives in the back of the metal shop. With no emergency stop or user protection at all, we named this contraption “Bendytube Crushyourthumbs.”
This tool didn’t have the appropriate dies for the patty, which was created from 2″…
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