I brought Beaky and Mango to Mephit Fur Meet 2024, and it didn’t go well. Let’s look at what happened!
Before the Con
At MFM 2023 I had a problem with Beaky. She kept losing screws, which meant I couldn’t run her for more than an hour or so at a time. This time, before I left the house for the convention, I yelled “DON’T COME OFF” at the screws and put red thread locker on the motion parts.
At the Con
Thread locker worked great! I did not have a single gear pop off during the con. (It’s almost like thread locker exists for a reason!) The first night I ran them both for about three hours as a result.
However, this caused another issue that I was not expecting. They got really hot inside. Like, really really hot. I had a hard time grabbing their heads at the end of the night it was so hot.
This heat caused a failure I was not expecting.
The plastic on both of them got so hot that the plastic warped, and allowed the ball bearing at the top holding their heads to pop out. It also made it so hot that the ball bearings (which were just friction fit) no longer fit. These photos were taken once I got back at home, with everything cool.
The photo on the left shows the extreme warping. The line shows how much things warped. These components are suppose to be all in a row, and all vertical. (And parallel to the circuit board.)
Mango’s failure was ever more wild than Beaky’s. Mango was able to pull his head off, because the plastic nut I use to secure it got so warm that it warped it and allowed the capture nut to come out.
I was not at all expecting this, so I had to sideline them for the rest of the con. 😢
Moving Forward
I learned a bunch of things during this failure.
Plastic isn’t enough
I use 3D printers to make my parts, and that’s great for prototyping, but I need to start making things out of metal.
I do not have a CNC machine, nor do I have room for one at the moment. There are services out there (like SendCutSend) that allow you to send AutoCAD files to and they will CNC them and send them to you. I’m going to learn to learn how to do this.
Monitor all of the things
My current generation of the Creature Controller includes a temperature sensor. I need to start using this data to have them shut down if they get too hot. I have all of the stuff in place to make this happen, but I hadn’t had time to write it before MFM 2024.
Things that move have vibrations
My trick with using thread locker worked! But I need to keep on doing this. Those bearings will get a lot and lot of use over time, and I need to make sure they don’t pop out.
Final Thoughts
While MFM 2024 was largely a bust for reasons I did not expect, I learned a lot. A whole lot. I’m not really mad because of all of the knowledge I gained. I was able to solve the problem from 2023, which lead to another problem for 2024. Now that I have two working birds I expect to start using them a lot more, which will give me a lot of time to work out the kinks before MFM 2025.