How Lethal Was Blendo REALLY?

silver Defender says I recently heard about blendo can you tell us what it was like in action was it as lethal as the old videos show blendo was a robot that Jaime designed for the very first robot wars which were put on by Mark Thorpe here in San Francisco I think in 92 or 93 or 94. 93 or 94. and this was before BattleBots it was called robot wars and Mark Dorp was an old ilm modeler model maker and inventor and he uh he came up with the idea for robot wars this is where I met Mark zatrakian and so many of the people that would become friends and colleagues over the years and I was working for Jamie and Jamie was like I have it on gear for a robot uh I want to make a spinning disc that we spin up to 30 000 revolutions per minute and then send it into the arena and we how did he say it how did he want to do this right he wanted to spin it up to 30 000 RPM which is our gargantuan my dental drill here does not go that fast and then he wanted because the matches were only three minutes long he was like 180 seconds he was thinking he could tap power out of the spinning for driving and control which is not wrong that's actually a great idea but he was curious about the RPM and so he called up Jamie called up a friend of his who was a physicist and the physicist said how big is this disc you want to make a Jamie it was like about three feet in diameter and the guy said at that speed the outside edge would be traveling so fast it would burst into flames in contact with the air that the friction with the air was enough to make the steel disintegrate at that RPM So Jamie was like maybe it's a little slower so blendo became an upside down heavy walk screwed to a spinning steel frame on v-bar v-groove bearings powered by a five horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine it spun at about 400 RPM it had on it a pair of I think 3 8 inch thick uh hardened steel blades and sharpened steel blades with both the sharpened Leading Edge and an upper Edge this thing was so scary I built all the RC and control systems for blendo uh and it was like the side project that the shop did getting ready for BattleBots for robot wars excuse me um the first time we fired up blendo we didn't have the sharpened horns on it it was just a steel disc oh my God there's so many things around blending blender's an amazing story I learned a lot about Jamie and from him watching him build that robot so the two main pieces that drive blendo are a platform out of steel that holds the engine and the v-groove bearings in which ride the outer ring that the walk bolts to so the whole outer case of this thing is spinning there are Spinners now that follow this exact format and it is a remarkably successful format for a battling robot because you can conserve tremendous amounts of energy centrifically um but the but but it begs this question of how do you get a perfectly balanced wheel spinning that fast in the v-groove bearings the way Jamie did it was he took this piece of Steel he had plasma cut too close to the right Dimension and then he used it grinder an angle grinder to make the the V that would match the V groove and the way he did that was he had an empty room in the warehouse and he set up this piece of Steel on a turntable that spun about this fast what is that about 40 50 rpm it's just fun like that and he set that up and he put an angle grinder on like a drop arm and he just like what it sounded like in that room was the worst sound you have ever heard and it lasted for days but it was an excellent way to achieve a very round v-groove in a size that dwarfed any machine we had in the shop so he builds this he attaches it with the v-groove bearings he gives the v-groove bearings each an offset Cam that is their hole isn't drilled perfectly centered so you can actually adjust their tension that was really good we got the engine mounted on it we had a clutch mounted to it and the way you started blendo was you actually had to the the five horsepower engine has a center a spindle that worry that that you rotate and you pull on the starter to rotate it but Jamie threaded that spindle and built a another thread in a drill and he would and then to Power It Up using the drill that would the the drill was the equivalent of pulling on the the that thing uh and then as it spun up it would spin the drill back out and it totally worked so we're on we're on Quint Street down in the edge of dog patch and Bayview and we set up a a circle of sandbags around this thing this is for the very first starting of it and Jamie stands on the sandbags so he's over any part of blendo that can get to him he's above it and he leans over so terrifying he leans over the trolley and it spins out everything works great and then he backs up he runs away I think footage of this still exists you'll have to ask him and that blendo saws goes just the sharpened blade of the outer rim of blendo what right through a line of sandbags and right towards Jamie's car uh and I had the shut off and our shut off actually worked but starting blender was always that terrifying and it was we did it on apple boxes we still Jamie Jamie was the only one crazy enough and since he built it he could take the danger of starting it and he did um blendo was insanely successful as a competitor um he uh blendo had four matches in two years none of the matches lasted longer than 10 10 or 15 seconds it was like opponent enters frame opponent touches blendo opponent is dead and unfortunately in the second of each match each year that we competed in the destruction of blendo's opponent blendo took a piece of their opponent and sent it over the barrier into the audience no one was hurt the first time it was a fan they thought it was great the second time the second year it was a lawyer one of the lawyers for the production and in both cases after our second matches the same thing happened two years in a row it was crazy they came to our our our pet and they said listen we have to disqualify you because even though you have met met and matched and passed all of our safety inspections we did not posit that someone could build a thing with this much power to it and so we need to pull you out of production for legal and liability reasons and we'd like to award you uh one of the first prizes in lieu of competition and thus there were other winners that won in combat but we also got a first prize trophy in both of the years that we competed in lieu of competition which on frankly is like the best possible outcome no there's no reason to ever compete with blendo ever again you've already reached the Zenith um London was spectacular a real a really great engineering lesson uh and uh yeah and those BattleBots days were amazing because we showed up trying to be cool and we all wore black and you know we didn't talk a lot but we still made friends that we still have today um the pit of BattleBots and Robot Wars one of the more egalitarian sharing supportive spaces for bakers that I had ever found and I have ever found and that was really that's really really lovely um uh SP Productions asks do I have a new watch on my wrist yeah I do um I have a right now I'm wearing my Seiko divers 200 meter watch uh I think sometimes called the Pepsi watch um you know my omegas are on the Frets I uh I'm trying I'm someone's going to wreck someone I know is recommending to me a local watch repair person to fix my omegas because I'm tired of sending them to Omega it always costs a lot it takes a few it takes months and they still go back in the shop so I'm gonna get a local watch fixer and I was wearing the uh uh uh the Apple watch Ultra for a while which I really dug but when I travel um I prefer to know what time it is back home and thus and that may be something you can do with the Apple watch you can get it to display another time zones time than the one you're in but I couldn't figure it out and I stopped trying and just went traveling with this watch so whenever I'm traveling I keep the watch on my wrist set to the time here in San Francisco and that lets me know it just helps me understand what's going on at home uh you know what what the day is like thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get Advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the atom Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 2,218,491

Keywords: tested, combat robots, adam savage, jamie hyneman, blendo, jamie hyneman blendo, adam savage blendo, tested adam savage, adam savage battlebots, jamie hyneman battlebots, blendo battlebots, adam savage jamie hyneman, robot wars blendo, adam savage jamie hyneman robot wars, adam savage jamie hyneman relationship, dangerous robots, blendo lethal weapon, jamie hyneman robot wars, jamie hyneman robot wars blendo, jamie hynemans robot blendo, jamie hyneman robot, battlebots

Id: 0i4dkb5w2Lg

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023