hey everybody adam savage here at funko with pawn davis and you are in the presence
of greatness no neither of us um this here is the trophy for the 2000 uh rumble lightweight
championship which was won by mauser mecca catbot meow meow it's required to say meow meow
fond davis's battlebot robot dude let's talk about melser mouser had a long career
as a middleweight as a middleweight yeah so uh that means it was uh it started as a 50-pound
robot that looked more like the original paint pink paint scheme that's how i originally remember
and with the the cyborg well yeah the first the very first it was robot wars we fought at fort
baker for mason you were part of that too yeah so oh my god yeah right yeah of course of course yeah
ilm had merrimack and i had i had my mouser and uh the robot was uh destroyed actually this happened
in yeah it was destroyed on this side so i made a cyborg cover and that's how it was mouser then
it became mouser mecha catbot and every year it would evolve but we installed the led and
all the gribbles for one side after that so this is the early iteration of mouse ear and this was
this is the results of the final increment this is the final incarnation yeah so it's it's seen some
let's see it's some action am i right this is um this is lexan polycarbonate that's right
same stuff they make bulletproof glass from just thinner and you pulled this on the uh on the big
four by four at ilm yeah that's right a four foot by four foot vacuum former absolutely lovely yeah
and this was very tricky to do because um the the reason it's so resilient is it has a high
water content moisture content in it that's one of the reasons for its resiliency yeah and so if you
uh vacuum form it all that moisture comes out and it blisters it boils basically and it blisters all
over the place yeah so i i had a trick you have to bake it out and it loses some of its moisture
if you bake it and then you stick it in the vacu former while it's still hot and then you can pull
a form without getting too much blistering and it was always the hardest thing about making this
robot was the new body every every season well and i don't know if you ran into this but we made the
uh clear cover of blendo out of vacuum formed like lexan uh polycarbonate and we found that it held
just fine until there was this point at which we were gluing some last thing and we hit the thing
we were gluing with a little bit of kicker and when the kicker hit the polycarbonate it
literally exploded it released all these internal tensions from the vacuum forming and it literally
cracked and just became nothing but shards wow i've never seen anything like it i had not had
that so i wouldn't get a kicker anywhere near this thing that's crazy okay talk about mouser and how
and the evolution that mouse or mega cat bought went through well this and this is my original
uh binder so you always have a project binder with your robotics projects always
and uh harrison ford yeah oh this is great this is some of the original this is the original design
before i actually built anything some eyeball tests that's right those are actually full-size
eyeballs oh those are the original sponsor stickers oh wow yeah there's wiring diagrams
everything that i ever did there's there's the whole wiring diagram you could build your own
master just snap i love shot that the original uh mouser had i think it was a saw in the front
and back and then we painted the saw two colors so that on camera you could see the rotation of the
saw otherwise it just disappears and looks just silver right so it didn't look very still doing
visual storytelling even when you're fighting with both absolutely you got to make well for me uh
fighting in these competitions was never really about winning so much is putting on a really good
show so mouser was actually a terrible design for winning uh we won 50 of our matches which is great
yeah um but uh it was mostly designed to just put on a good show and that's what i wanted to do
um and then it started with the two saws and then it changed to have a pneumatic spiked tail
on the end how many times could you use that in the course of a fight oh man it i everything in
here was based on the three-minute match yeah so i had three minutes of absolute use of this
just constant oh nice and and yeah that's so the elect like everything though at three minutes and
three seconds would just die and it would just be a big paperweight
there's another piece that i noticed here which is i had totally forgotten about these
oh yeah this is a battery holder for an old makita drill battery but it's meant to go
on the back of one of these to power this is how we powered all of our rc that's how you
got more power yeah than than just having the battery pack inside i don't even know if i have
like a nikita battery i still have my very first battery but i don't think i have a charger yeah
so we had the battery packs and then this is this is a retrofit futaba radio uh that had um
john foreman at ilm help wire this up for me john was one of the along with grant mahara one of the
other electronics experts at ilm oh so this is an add-on yes being able to act oh so you didn't have
to use these switches for the weaponry you could use these yeah because it was so complicated to
drive the robot and operate all the weapons at the same time because it had a front flipper too
so it was a flipper this uh tail spike and then the saw on the front and so this you could turn
on and off you had to you know you didn't have to care about your battery power your air and
but you had somebody else doing that so yeah so my my wife at the time would operate the weapons
while i would drive but i also had ability to operate weapons on here as well amazing
and this was always one of my prizes um prized possessions because uh mark anderson gave this
to me this is one of ilm's retired transmitters no way so and and this goes this this transmitter was
very likely used on empire strikes back in a whole host of other things and it was always just that
was my good luck charm right there dude that is a lovely piece of history i want to talk about this
weird and super critical piece of plastic you've actually helped me with this checklist
i'm sure the events uh so this is uh something we this was a cover that would protect this lid would
come down pretty hard and it would it would it would hit things in here and break them possibly
unless we put in just a simple piece of plastic so this piece of plastic would be inside the robot
and i would flip this open before every match and it had a checklist of all the things that
you had to do before a match and you could see it's a lengthy list and if you forgot any
one of these things it was a critical error you would lose like you would not function possibly
just for anyone who's not familiar with building a robot for battlebots in order to make sure it can
survive a three-minute match you effectively have to build something that you can hit with a two by
four for three minutes and it keeps running i mean as hard as you possibly can yeah it was
mind-blowing the amount of abuse and damage you would receive this has the uh one of the
frames inside it so you can see nice so this is your custom uh cylinder for holding on to the
air yeah this one though that's an off-the-shelf cylinder okay this was this was a rapid pour uh
pneumatic cylinder that would just dump air into the the tail so okay activate very quickly
um and then let's see oh and then i'm trying to remember it's been a while since i've looked at
this thing there's a regulator these are the motors right these are airplane starter motors
for for radio control airplane like the large ones you would put it on the propeller and start
them oh one of those but you have to build really high torque super lightweight and then these are
these wheels being chewed up yeah so these are four wheels these are colson casters
because they're solid rubber and you know you can see the damage this is like yeah the saws
and the arena itself would just eat your robot alive there's another thing you did with this
that i remember being really surprised by which is that you made the aluminum frame pieces you didn't
make them on a mill you didn't water cut them you didn't laser cut them you used a freaking router
yes i didn't think that was possible until i saw you make a plywood template and cut out like two
of these one after yeah yeah that's how all the well these were later cnc but i would do the same
for these pieces too if you cut out a shape and you attach it to a piece of metal routers
if you get a carbide tip they can cut aluminum so amazing that blade could knock out the prep
took longer than time than it actually took to make these bases but the bases because
of the saws in the arena i would have to replace these during between matches
so it was it was always a big deal when you had to transfer all the stuff onto the new base if
it gets damaged too much you know one thing uh i visited the battle bot set a couple of seasons
ago and got to be a guest judge as as you have done and one of the things i was super gratified
to see was that same sense of camaraderie and even despite the fact that everyone's competing
everyone is still really helping each other out behind the scenes of battlebots yeah
that was that was one of those things that was really interesting when we started it was not
televised it was like 32 of us yeah building these robots and fighting them and we all knew each
other and if you if you were short of battery or a wheel or a tool like you could just ask someone
and everyone was really into like they just wanted to fight and they wanted a good fight so it was in
their best interest to make sure your robot was to full performance you know and when season one
of the show came out it was still just not that many battle bots the the second
season over 500 competitors showed up and it changed the it changed the dynamic quite a bit
that year you did have people you would walk up to them in the pits you know you share
the the pit area with other robot builders they throw a towel on their robot yeah and then you
if you ask them the specs on a motor you go oh what motor is that because we that's what we do
they would they would go yeah i'm not gonna tell you you know and but that it was funny because
that was the spirit of just that season yeah and they could see very quickly just by the behavior
of the veteran bot builders that that was not a thing yeah and and it became a lot more open
again and it actually makes the sport way more exciting if everyone is sharing their technology
because you want a good fight it is you want you don't want a robot to just die in the arena you
want to eviscerate it first especially since in those early competitions half of the robots left
the competition because of their own mechanical failures or more than half i think the majority
of matches i lost it was a mechanical failure not damaged from another robot right right and it like
nobody wants that kind of competition no it's boring i love the institutional knowledge that
i can see in how robust the bots are now because that only happens when everyone's really sharing
and understanding this can survive that can't this is what you have to protect this you don't have
to worry about yeah but and all of those all of those components that people share knowledge about
are not how you win anyway right you know it's about your design nor how you should want to win
yes this is loud this is this is sun tzu right you want your opponent at their absolute best
exactly it's a good ethos fun man thank you so much i haven't seen mouser in 20 years and it
is good to see an old friend he's happy to see you too thank you guys we'll see you next time