Who are/were Team Toaster?

Why a Savage Toaster?

John tells the story:
 "The Toaster story began at Mike (Scrapper, GBH, Facet) Rickard's charity event at Sevenoaks in the autumn of 1999. My girlfriend and I are in attendance- its our first experience of seeing robots in real life. I already have a design for my own six-wheeled invertible machine on paper (virtually identical to Crusader, oddly enough, which I was totally unaware of at the time). Taking advantage of the presence of Derek Foxwell, I talk to him about my plans for Team Black. He tells me that if the robot's black, it probably won't get on the show. Not enough contrast against the dark arena floor, so no good for TV. Somewhat dispirited, with visions of a Gothic themed robot fading, but inspired by Chaos 2's spectacular displays during the day's fights, various sketches are attempted on the back of an envelope as we head home on the train. Unbidden, the image of a pop-up toaster comes to mind, the toast snapping up like a robot's flipper. Entertained by this silliness, I begin to sketch a toaster with wheels and a flipper. My girlfriend is much amused, and reckons it has to be built. Little do we realise the consequences of this decision Back home, incredulity from my team mates gives way to a certain amount of resignation and horror, as they realise I'm serious about the Toaster. As they edge uneasily away, I attempt to justify the design with little hope of success, but fortunately (?) visions of a large toaster competing in RW overwhelm their sense of judgement, and we start to discuss how to actually build the thing. So, the practical upshot is that the Toaster has been designed to use what has become fairly standard technology for RW. Our initial idea was for a middleweight Toaster, but it was decided that if we were going to build a robot at all, it might as well be a heavyweight".

The History of the Savage Toaster

We started to build in 2000 for Robot Wars Series 4, but apart from some misplaced optimism, we also ran into serious problems with sourcing components. Not even close, in retrospect. We applied again for Series 5, and were pretty confident of being ready to rumble, but left the final push on the build a little late, and hit a few last minute snags (no doubt a depressingly familiar scenario for other builders), that left us at least a day or two short of completion. We never did compete at Robot Wars.
Team Toaster has competed in a small way with our antweight robot, The VileAnt Toaster (the existence of which is largely Jon (Xno) Howdle's fault), squeaking through a couple of rounds in Ant World Series 5, at The Wilson Schools event in June 2001. Subsequent attempts to compete with the Ant have been prey to conflicts with work and mechanical breakdowns, but we will return! We've also displayed the Toaster at several live events over the past few years, some of which feature in the events section of the site.
We did get the Toaster on TV eventually for the last two series of Technogames, shown in the spring of 2002 and 2003 on BBC2, in the two-a-side football tournament. In 2002 (mostly filmed just before Christmas 2001) we were paired with the excellent AAT (Arnold Terminegger). Due largely to Ian Inglis' experience, but also thanks to Richard's remarkably quick grasp of controlling the Toaster (and a bit of luck!), we managed to win bronze medals for third place! See the events section for pictures of a battered post-Technogames Toaster.
At Technogames 2003 we got through to the second round of the football, partnered with Storm 2, a.k.a. "The Ickle Toaster" due to AAT being unavailable. In our second round match we were beaten by the Typhoon Team, partly on the strength of Gary Cairn's excellent driving of Typhoon Rover, but also as a result of an "incident" involving a flying bowling ball and Storm's ball guide snapping off and flying out of the arena, effectively disqualifying us! As seen on TV the game was shown edited down as a straightforward 1-0 victory for the ATC. Oh well...
As the competition got tougher at RW and at live events it became increasingly clear that the 'fibreglass bathtub' bodyshell wasn't going to last long in modern combat, and the cost of repairing or replacing it were prohibitive to say the least. The reluctant decision was taken to completely rethink the design and build a new robot.
The new Savage Toaster, effectively The Savage Toaster 2, was intended to be more compact, and to be easier to build and maintain. This it was, but it also did not quite manage to get to the Robot Wars qualifiers- clearly not quite easy enough! The gallery pages have some pictures of Toaster 2 and the technical section below covers the differences between the two Toasters. At Kettering 2003, The Savage Toaster finally got some real combat in against Thor, which we won by the simple expedient of whacking it's hammer with the top of the Toaster until it got stuck and gave up. Ultimate Real Robots asked us if we'd like to be interviewed for an article in the magazine, and this took place in early 2004, with the magazines in print a few weeks later,
When I asked Alan Wood if he'd be interested in joining forces and getting heavily involved in a revised Toaster for 2004, he agreed, but somewhere along the line the robot stopped being a toaster and turned into a wedge called Ka-Pow! instead. Ka-Pow has it's own section on this site and is looking very promising, but I have a feeling that yet another Toaster will be built in the next year or so. Watch this space!

Technical details of the first Savage Toaster

Structure:
 We don't weld, but fortunately we know a man who does! Michael (Mick) Pearson has charged us very little for some superb work on the chassis. Often at short notice and at awkward times, he's never failed to come up with the goods and has proved to be very patient with our often rather loose descriptions of what we wanted. A gentleman and a craftsman. The material used was 1mm wall thickness 1" square-section steel tubing.
An old friend, Martin Higgs, who works for an engineering company, also did some invaluable work early in the project on the wheel mounting plates and the bearing blocks for the lifter arm. Most importantly, he also did all the work on attaching the drive sprockets to the motor shafts (with tool steel pins), fabricating the chain tensioner pulleys, drilling out centre clearance and lightening holes on the big cogs for the wheels, and making up spacers between the cogs and wheel hubs. He did all this work for free- I dread to think what it would have cost!
Local company Milton Keynes Metals did some other useful work for us too. MKM supplied us with most of the raw steel and aluminium used, and were also quite patient with our idiosyncratic and often rather under-documented requests for parts and materials.
We had intended to sort out the bodywork ourselves, but initial conversations with Tony Lang at Bedford Glass-fibre, who was very keen on Robot Wars and on the Toaster, convinced us to let him handle the actual moulding. We made a mould for the prototype one-piece shell, using thin plywood, chipboard ribs and at least 300,000 tacks. A big job in itself! Unfortunately, the curing process destroyed the mould. Tony did a fine job for us, using glass-fibre and Kevlar with a flame-retardant gel to make an excellent shell, limited only by the quality of our mould. This all makes it sound as if we did nothing ourselves- far from it! Although the design of The Toaster was too ambitious for us to handle the fabrication of the big bits, all of the major design work and all the internal structures, building and testing were handled by the team.

Drive system and electronics:
 The first Toaster ran on grass board wheels and tyres from Maxtrack, which have integral bearings. We used fixed 12mm bolts as axles. Martin (Anthrax) Gutowski suggested the wheels to us. Sprockets and chains were from the local branch of BSL. A big thank you to Adam Clarke for clarifying some of the details of chain drive systems during the earliest stages of design, and to Rob Heasman, then of the Steg-O-Saw-Us team, more recently with his own team, Oblark, for specific information about Steg's very effective chain-drive.
Motors were Bosch GPA 750s, purchased second-hand, but basically unused, from Anthrax. The two drive wheels were chain-driven, on a ratio of about 8.5:1. Batteries were two of the then ubiquitous budget Micro Kiels, wired in series to give 24volts. Speed controllers were Speedmaster 120Amp units, used only by us and the Frumious Frog team, who were participants in the Series 4 qualifiers. A built-in PIC-based interface board is used in each of the Speedmasters, which provided fail-safes and decodes the signals from the radio receiver into pulses. The output stage of the speed controllers modulates the power from the batteries according to the width of the pulses, which drives the motors. Speedmaster also supplied a mixer module to provide separate speed/direction and steering controls, as opposed to tank steering. Powertrac supplied us with an on-board battery checker and another module comprising a pair of high-current electronic switches, with built in fail-safes to actuate the pneumatic valves that controlled the flow of gas into the weapon rams.

Pneumatics:
 The weapon system on the original Savage Toaster was never used in combat but was a complete working system.
A standard 2Kg CO2 fire extinguisher was used as a reservoir tank, storing CO2 at about 750psi/ 50 bar. Gas pressure was reduced by an American Victor SR310 regulator, to about 150psi/ 10 bar, and then split off to two ½" port 5/2 solenoid valves from Chelmer Pneumatics. Various low-pressure fittings were supplied by SMC, Chelmer, EngSurplus and donated by fellow roboteer Chris Lundregan, a very helpful guy who also gave us some very useful bits of aluminium and polycarbonate. Two 80mm bore, 160mm stroke rams were used for the weapons. These were picked up second-hand from EngSurplus. One was cut down, sharpened and hardened to create a stabber at the rear of The Toaster. A pair of fixed spikes flanked this, to form our 'toasting fork' weapon. The other ram is used to power the lifter at the front. This was styled as the plunger used to set the toast down in a conventional toaster, with two large, hardened spikes bolted on the sides to stab and lift opponents. To complete the toaster look, when the weapon fired, oversized toast was intended to pop up from the top. In practice, although we did eventually come up with a workable mechanism, this was never achieved in practice! Self-righting was to be provided by side extensions on the lifter, much in the manner of the early self-righters on Behemoth.

Technical details of the second Savage Toaster

The second Toaster, as featured in Real Robots, was quite a bit smaller than the original. The basic shell on Toaster One was about 900x750x450mm. Toaster Two was more like 750x620x360mm. Instead of fibreglass, the new robot was armoured with aluminium and polycarbonate panels over steel frames. Thanks to a swap with John 'Steel Avenger' Willoughby, we acquired a large 100x155mm pneumatic ram. The new weapon arm was in the general style of Bigger Brother, but designed to retract flush with the shell and made of 3mm thick 1" box section steel. Small buffer tanks were added to improve flow and a big 3/2 valve was used to fire the weapon with gravity or a bungee retracting the arm. The Victor regulator was reused. Drive was still based on the Bosches but with new, more responsive Dogz... er, DBX speed controllers. The grassboard wheels were replaced by RS aluminium trolley wheels, similar to those used by TerrorHurtz and KillerHurtz. The basic gearing remained about the same, taking into account the smaller diameter wheels, at just under 5:1. Mick Pearson once again cut and welded the frame for us and also provided design input on the bearings for the ram. My brother, Peter, helped tremendously with the build, particularly with the armour. Alan Wood of Team Onslaught kindly handled the machining of the new main drive wheels and cogs for us, to ensure proper concentricity. The drive system from the second Toaster has now been transferred to our new robot, Ka-Pow!