Get away from her you @$#%*!
This video has been sponsored by Skillshare but more on that later.
Hey guys! I am super super super excited to announce our latest and one of our
biggest make real projects yet. The power loader from aliens. Hydraulically powered
and able to lift thousands of pounds. If there is a mid-sized 8 to 10-foot mega
bot or Battle BOTS League it would be a serious contender. It will be able to
flip and crush cars. You see I've actually wanted to do this project ever
since I started making videos for YouTube, but the budget and scale of it
was just too big at the time.
After the exoskeleton is done my next main project I really hope to do is building the EXO loader
suit from the alien movies. It's quite a bit bigger of a project and it would
probably cost at least five to ten thousand dollars in materials alone I
won't be doing that for a while unless obviously this channel becomes
really big. Though I'm honestly not sure how I thought it would only cost five to
ten thousand dollars we've already spent that much just on one arm. Anyway I
mentioned the project again and again as the channel grew in various interviews,
comments on YouTube and videos!
I'm planning on doing the Power Loader from the Aliens movie. And that will be able to flip the car not just pick it up.
In fact it was in this video that we met Bogdan for the first time. He was a fan of the original
pneumatic exoskeleton that I built and he actually built his own version during
high school. Then he volunteered for us that summer and he's been working part
time with us ever since. He's now almost done college and convinced me to finally
start the power loader project and he's actually been doing a bunch of the
design of the arm over the past year so without further ado let's take a look at
the cad and see how this is actually going to work!
All right, so, how are we actually going to design the power loader from aliens?
Now luckily since the movies been out for 33 years it came out in 1986 there's
actually a lot of reference material available online so let's take a look at
this fan-made Wikia of the P-5000 powered work loader. And as you can see
we've got lots of pictures on here, some sketches and diagrams and of course they
made a whole bunch of little toys. One of which I actually have right here.
It's pretty cool It can't really do that much and it's a very basic model of the power
loader there's no hydraulic hoses or anything like that and honestly it's
pretty pretty fragile unfortunately but let's read a bit more about the power
loader and how it actually works. So the really neat thing that I can really
appreciate on this is they actually made a full working prop for the movie as you
can see right here. The funny thing was it's actually it's a prop that's
constructed around the stuntman who's actually moving the suit and Sigourney
Weaver is actually attached to the stuntman. The whole thing weighed about
six hundred pounds it was made of fiberglass PVC and aluminum,
none of the hydraulics worked but the grippers did actually open and close
but the whole thing was actually kind of more like a marionette for the actual
filming of the movie, and they also made a miniature for a bunch of the shots
including the wide-angle shots during the fight with the Queen. The next
question I have is if this movie has been out for 33 years and there's this
much reference material online why hasn't someone already built a power
loader? Is it too complicated to engineer? Is it too expensive? Unfortunately I
think the real reason is: it's just not very practical a regular forklift is
actually very good at what it does and there's no real reason that you want
kind of a clumsy suit like this:
To replace a forklift.
But, luckily Hacksmith Entertainment here, we focus on building the projects that
aren't commercially viable we're not trying to make this to sell it we're
just trying to make it to see if we can and because it's a freakin power loader,
who doesn't want a power loader? The questions back to how are we actually going to
design this like it is quite the engineering feat. So like what we do for
most of our projects we're gonna go to grab CAD.
Now grab CAD is a community site that allows you to share 3d models of pretty
much anything let's just take a look and see if we can find the power loader.
So there's some construction equipment... Wow look at that! So a guy named Dano Vinson
actually uploaded a model of the power loader which looks fairly accurate to
the movie. That's pretty cool he's done some renderings of it and I think
there's a video. So yeah he's done actually a really good job modeling the
power loader from the movie and in whatever software he used I don't think
he's using SolidWorks he was able to even do some dynamic movements like this
to show how it actually work. So why don't we open up this model in
SolidWorks and see if we can use it as a reference for when we're designing the
real thing. So here it is. That's pretty cool. Now the unfortunate thing about
this model is it's actually just a single body, which makes it really
difficult to actually try and use this model for our design so really what
we're just going to be doing is using it as a reference for scale and general
shape of parts that we're trying to make. But to start why don't we start removing
the stuff that just doesn't work the funny thing is: hydraulics are a very
real thing but they need to be used properly to actually work.
So all these hoses none of this is realistic. Remember a hydraulic hose can
carry high pressure hydraulic fluid and having connection points like this
just doesn't work so I'm just gonna go ahead and go through the model and
basically turn everything that we can't use whatsoever
red. So now just you know paint the model red. All right so there we go so
basically as you can see none of these hydraulic hose locations or fittings or
connections are going to work for the real thing so we're gonna have to
definitely design that on our own. But what else will actually work and what
won't work? So in the movie it says it's actually a combination of a hydraulic
system and electric motors. So apparently the the hips here are electric motors
even though they have hydraulic hoses going to them and there's also no way,
like, how does this joint rotate? how does this joint rotate? It's either gotta be
an electric motor or... I'm not even sure so we're gonna have to figure out how
we're actually going to do that but one of the biggest issues with this design
is these big cylinders on the back. So we've got a joint here that basically
allows the arm to rotate back and forth like this and up and down like this. But
the way they show it being powered is with this one big hydraulic cylinder and
as you can see it's mounted down at the back near the spine and then attaches
there. That's only going to allow you to do one movement you're not going to be
able to isolate moving your arm forwards and back as well as up and down so
that's also something that we're going to have to change so I'm gonna
paint these red as well.
Alright so there's that. So what will actually work on this design? Well the
bicep hydraulics actually will work. It's fixed to the shoulder and
then it pushes the elbow out not unlike my original pneumatic
exoskeleton that I built years ago. So that'll work we can use the general
shape and outline of the arm, there's a lot cosmetic features that don't really
matter that we can include to make sure it looks like a power loader.
The question for the engineering standpoint is: Just how are we actually
going to make it work? Because like you saw in the actual movie it was just a
prop that was moving around using wires and movie magic. So to make an actual
working power loader we actually have to think a little bit and figure out how
best to approach this. Now because this is such a huge project we're gonna break
it down and build individual pieces of the power loader at a time so to start
we're gonna build just the arm. So I'm actually going to just isolate just the
arm and then we can go from there. Alright so now that we have the ar
isolated, how are we going to use this as a reference to actually design our version
of the power loader? And the nice thing is in SolidWorks is you can do something
called a face export to DXF. So basically I can select all these faces of this
linkage that we'll call the bicep linkage and if I right-click on that I can do
export to DXF. And what we're left with is a perfect outline of the arm now
this is just about all that we can actually use from this reference model
just the general outside shape of some of the joints to try and keep it to make
sure it looks like the actual power loader that you can see right here.
Because mechanically all the hydraulics and all the actual working features of
the power loader we're gonna have to design those from scratch. But this is at
least at least save us a bit of time in making sure that it actually looks like
the power loader I'm just gonna go go ahead and save that.
And what we can do is if we open it up we can import it as a 2d sketch. Now just
to show you how simple this is we can select all these areas, let's make it
half an inch thick. And there you go that's the rough shape of the
bicep of the power loader arm. So the nice thing with that is now we can do
any modifications we need to actually mount the real hydraulics and the other
joints and how all that's going to work but at least having this model means
we have a reference to look at to make sure we're on the same track to make
sure we're actually making it just like the actual one from aliens.
All right, let's start designing!
There you have it. All right just kidding we've actually already
designed the arm and when I say we I actually mean Bogdan. So Bogdan has been the
main driving force behind actually making this project happen. He's really
inspired by the power loader and he designed all this, actually a good part
of it last year before we had the funding or the even the ability to build
such a thing in-house. And ever since we got the plasma cutter from Elite Metal
Tools it was like: "Hey we could actually make this now." So this past Christmas
break we actually we started actually making it for the next design we will
actually record it and show you guys how we actually did the 3d modeling but for
this I'm just going to try and explain how we did the design. So if you can't
wait for our future power loader videos and you want to start learning SolidWorks
right away there are actually some awesome SolidWorks tutorial classes
available on Skillshare.com. One of the most common questions we get asked about
our projects is: How do we learn how to do all this cool stuff? And the answer is
simple we're self-taught learners we use the Internet to our advantage
to solve problems. It's amazing the kind of resources you can find just like
Skillshare.com. Skillshare is an online learning community for creators with
more than 25,000 classes in design, business, technology and even lifestyle!
Start 2019 outright with a premium membership that gives you unlimited
access to take all the classes you want on skills you want to learn to achieve
your 2019 goals. Wanna learn how to design cool things in CAD like us? Like, I don't
know... A power loader?! We use SolidWorks on a near daily basis and you can learn how
to use it too right here on Skillshare.com or if you're more interested in making
videos like us we use Adobe Premiere Pro and we've learned tons of tricks from
Jordy who's another youtuber and instructor on Skillshare.com.
Skillshare premium is super affordable with an annual subscription costing less than
$10 a month plus the first 500 my subscribers to use my link below will
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so, what are you waiting for? So for the next design we will actually
record it and show you guys how we actually did the 3d modeling
to come up with the actual design that we then manufacture and fabricate. But
for this I'm just going to try and explain how we did the design. So first
I'm gonna roll back some of the features inside of SolidWorks. There, look familiar?
So we did have to modify it a little bit as you can see, this mounting point
for one of the cylinders was originally a lot lower and we had to move it up
here so we could actually get a proper range of motion for the whole arm. Which you'll
see here. That means that cylinder is actually going to be able to allow you
to have the arm be able to go from a full curl to a straight arm like that.
How we're actually going to fabricate it is kind of cool. So what what Bogdan is
done is he's designed a tab and slot system so what that means is after we
plasma cut the whole thing out we'll actually be able to just almost like put
it together like a normal puzzle and then once it's clamped in place we just
have to weld those seams in and we'll be left with an extremely structural, very
strong steel member. We've got some face plates here and then the joints will
actually be these big pipes right here. So moving on let's take a look at the
arm or the forearm. Same idea what happened was we originally exported a
DXF of the outline of the reference model and then we use that to make sure
what we were designing is at least similar so it ends up looking like the
power loader. And again we added some slots and tabs and if you're curious
about slot and tab design, it's great for plasma cutting as well as just laser
cutting, which you'll be able to find a local makerspace. And there's actually
this really cool website I like and it's called makercase.com. So what this does
is if you select finger joints you can actually say: "I want to make a box that's
12 inches wide by 4 inches tall by 8 inches deep" And you can say how thick the
material is that you're going to be using for the project. And if you go generate
laser cutter plans. It actually exports the outline that you
need to then put in your laser cutter and actually be able to make that box.
And it's a really cool fabrication method that you can use with a laser
cutter to quickly fabricate project boxes. Because you wouldn't want a 3d
print a giant box it would take forever. So with a laser cutter sometimes it takes
less than a minute to laser cut all that stuff out, a bit a hot-glue, a bit of folding
it around and bam you're left with a box. So basically that's exactly what we've
done on just a larger more industrial scale for the power loader, except our
box is made out of steel and we're actually gonna be welding it shut. So
next up we have the wrist joint which is kind of cool and to solve the issue of
being able to have a wrist that can actually go like this.
Bogdan decided to mount another hydraulic cylinder on the side of the
arm. Now this is not how they did it in the movie but it's probably the best way
that we can actually do it. So as you can see this cylinder when it extends will
actually allow you to move the wrist 90 degrees in total from one way to the
other way. And then the part that we haven't quite touched yet is actually
the wrist. How are we going to get the wrist to actually spin like this? There's
a few methods: we could either try and build something like this hydraulic
cylinder or we could potentially have a hydraulic motor with a gear around this
entire plate that allows it to rotate. And the cool thing with that is if we do
that we could potentially have infinite rotations we could just keep spinning it.
Because once this thing's done we're gonna be wanting to add different
attachments like say maybe a Bioshock Big Daddy drill.
Which could just continually spin and we could do all kinds of cool stuff like
that. So anyways like I said this CAD design was already done over actually
the past year, so we weren't able to record it and show you the actual
process of doing that but for future designs we will be showing you the
actual CAD process. But, what this means is we can start fabricating the arm so,
let's start building!
So now we're exporting all the remaining DXF for the three inch steel. And then
we'll be ready to start welding!
Alright while we finish plasma cutting the rest of
the parts for the power loaders first arm, make sure you smash that subscribe
button and turn notifications on! Because this is a video series you do not want
to miss. We'll be trying to release one video per month on the series while
still making our regular make it real content. It'll just be like the days of
the original exoskeleton where we posted a bunch of updates as the project evolved.
Anyway in the next video we'll get the arm fully welded and built with hydraulics
and do a quick test. But, if you can't wait for that next video make sure you
follow us on social @theHacksmith as we'll be posting real time project
updates. Also if you happen to be a YouTube channel member of the Hacksmith
it's that join button right next to subscribe. You'll actually have access to
see video number two right now!
Do it... Do it now!