Armor Cutting
We spent a bit of time cutting the armor to size. We used a reciprocating saw to cut the armor. It's a bit nerve racking making the cuts when you don't have any spare sheets of armor laying around!
At this point, relatively late in the game, we thought we had only a few simple tasks left. Little did we know what an amazing amount of work lay ahead!
We started by trying to determine out to mount the batteries. Our first approach was to use some thin aluminium to fashion brackets out of. We cut a bunch to size, then struggled to figure out how to attach it to the steel frame. We were happy with bolting it to the frame, but we wanted to make sure we could slide the batteries out as needed. No matter how hard we tried to come up with a way to bolt the aluminum on, it seemed to prevent us from removing the batteries easily.
We eventually threw out the aluminium bracket idea, and instead went with a steel bracket approach. The advantage was that we could just weld the bracket to the rest of the frame. The disadvantage was that we could not easily move the battery position in the future. To keep the battery from sliding out, we fashioned piece of steel that bolted to the frame. Thus, we only had to unscrew one bolt, and could slide the batteries out.
Next, we had to figure out a way to attach the radio components to the frame. We ended up modifying a small aluminum box so that it contained the receiver, Team Delta H-Bridge to control the weapon, and the mixer for the 2 IF Victors. We were hoping that keeping these components enclosed would help minimize radio interference. We didn't have a lot of room to work with, and eventually trimmed the H-Bridge with a Dremel so that it would fit in the box.
At this point, we were rapidly running out of time. Everything from this point on was done on or after 5/20, and we were planning on leaving Colorado early on the 21st. We didn't take a lot of pictures until we reached SF, so our colorful prose will have to fill the void!
Next came attaching the Victors to the frame. We decided to bolt them to pieces of polycarbonate that was in turn bolted to the frame. Since we were quickly running out of room inside the frame, it proved difficult to get the fit right, and to thread all the appropriate holes. We were also having to cut bolts to length, which made it really easy to screw up the threading all the various holes.
We then finished cutting the armor to size, and the started the arduos task of bolting it to the frame. This involved drilling holes thru the armor and frame, then welding on weld nuts to the frame. By the time it was over, we had done this nearly 100 times! (It was also about 5:00AM Monday morning, it was actually light outside!) During this time, we also welded on two additional small brackets, one to hold the master switch(es), and another to hold the receiver batteries.
Other miscellaneous tasks were done in this time frame including fashioning a bracket to help hold the weapon motor and radio box in place, creating a top sub frame assembly to protect from blows from above, re-forming the lifter fork, since the original was badly warped, and building a block to set DM on while we worked on it. We also painted the armor a matte black color.
We then cut and soldered the necessary wiring to size. We afixed two small terminal blocks to the various slabs of polycarb. We then un-assembled everything in order to paint the frame. Here are the before and after shots:
You can see that our frame became amazingly complex after we got done making brackets and tabs for everything. It's great to look at the gallery and note the picture that is titled "Nearly done frame". Boy were we wrong.
At this point, it was nearly 6AM on Monday. We decided to sleep a few hours, then load up the SUV to head to SF. We had never fully assembled Dark Matter (in fact DarkMatter was completely dissassembled until we got to SF), had no idea how much he weighed, never had bolted on all the armor, and had never done any range tests with the radio. Woo hoo! San Francisco here we come!
Here is a short report of the adventures in San Francisco.
Build Progress: February March April May