Mechanic Designs

The base was the first piece of Brak to be design and built, and its heritage (if you really want to call it that) goes back to 1992. But to quote a line from the motion picture Airplane!, "I could go on, but I'd probably start to bore you". So if you want to be bored, go rent the movie.

Once again, I'm not a mechanical engineer by education but probably a latent one by interest. I've always loved building things. I didn't invent anything novel when designing the base, I just wanted something like a synchronous drive system which didn't weight 600 pounds like a Denning robot.

This section gives the information on:

Base Description: all that information I promised not to bore you with earlier,
Design Goals: some of the factors which were considered in designing the base,
Theory of Operation: how we think it works, and
Design Details: everything else, including the plans and list of parts

We first assembled the base in the summer of 1995 and were ecstatic when it actually moved. There are a few things that in hindsight we would have changed but it worked pretty well over the next six years.

In Fall 2000 we embarked on a plan to fix some of these things. The goal was to end up in Spring 2001 with a new base to replace the old one. Unfortunately, what really happened was we ended up in Spring 2002 with one big pile of parts and no base. Humpty Dumpty and all that. It took until Summer 2003 to get on with those original plans; the details of the new mobile base (which, for all intents and purposes, we may as well call Brak too), are being documented here:

Design Goals: what improvements we are trying to make,
Theory of Operation: how we think it works, and
Design Details: everything else, including the plans and list of parts