SUBLIME3

Well the pictures have been piling up so I thought I would do another update. Allot has gone on and a few decisions where made. The grabber/lifter was turning out to be to heavy and the materials I would have had to make it out of to make the 58 pound cut off would have made the arm to weak. After realizing I could put a spinner weapon on this robot I have been planning for a while I jumped on it.

When I started making the arm is that last report it was a 1/4" thick steel U channel. That was to heavy so I attempted to make the arm from two pipes. After doing some stress testing I decided these where not up to the task, and the lifter/pincher idea was pretty much abandoned.

I went to work making a right angle gear box for the EV motor using bevel gears to power the spinner blade. I started to cut the gear box housings out, they are all 1/2" thick x 3" wide 6061. Here are the two sides with bearing holes bored into them.

I decided to lighten these up so I did some creative milling on them.

After I abandoned the lifter I pulled some gears and an EV motor from my parts stash and I cut the top of the housing out, bored out a bearing holder in the center, and then made it lighter by milling out unneeded material. Here is the base of the gearbox housing, it is hard to see since my camera sucks but there is a pocket milled into it to hole a tapered roller bearing that will support the bottom of the spinner axle.

Here is a shot of all the parts to the gearbox housing, you might have noticed I milled out the bottom plate to in an effort to save weight. Here is a shot with them laid out where they will go. Next I needed to machine a shaft for the spinner to ride on. I took a long piece of 1.5" steel round stuck and cut it to length on the bandsaw.

Here is the shaft after I debured the edges, pretty meaty! The bevel gear I am using has a 1.5" bore that this shaft slides into. The top bearing where the shaft exits the gear box and is atached to the spinning blade is only 3/4" big so I had the turn down most of the shaft to 3/4".

Here is the complete shaft. Here is the shaft, bevel gear, and bearings instaled in the gearbox housing.

The next thing I had to do was build a mount for the EV motor that will spin the gearbox. Here is a large chunk of plastic (Thanks Ray) that I will machine into the mount. Here is a snap of the mount after I removed most of the material from the rounded area with a step pattern; I then rounded it with the fly cutter. After the mount for the motor was out of the way I went ahead and started attaching the smaller bevel gear to the output shaft of the EV motor. Here is me comparing the 5/16" axle to the 3/4" bore in the gear.

I decided the best way to go about mounting the gear was to lathe up an adapter. I cut a length of 3/4" shafting on the bandsaw, put the bevel gear on it, and then laid it out in front of the motor to see if the idea looked OK, I think so. I then drilled a hole in the center of the adapter so I could put the shaft of the motor into it.

The EV's come with a spring pin in the shaft to mount things to. I decided to use the pin so I cut a notch in the back of the axle, then slid it on the motor shaft, perfect fit! the silver thing by the bevel gear is the 3/4" bearing that mounts in the gearbox housing. Here is the gearbox with the motor installed, I just used a hose clamp to secure the motor down.

That is it for this report, I will make the blade and redo the drive with gears on the next. In the meantime here are a few shots with the gearbox sitting in the robot.