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Mike Konshak, with the help of Jeff McLay,
13, son of a StorageTek vice president, uses a torch t o straighten
the swinging arm of his combat robot at his Louisville
home. |
Robot Dojo prepares mechanical warriors
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| 12/7/2001 6:23:00 PM |
| By Todd Neff |
Most people have nondescript hobbies
such as reading, hiking, golf and skiing.
Mike Konshak is
not like most people. Konshak, a 54-year-old senior advisory
development engineer in StorageTek’s Client Server Disk Engineering
group, designs and builds 220-pound, radio-controlled fighting
robots.
Konshak is the engineer responsible for designing
the mechanical packaging for Louisville-based StorageTek’s
server-side hard-disk arrays, which involves airflow design, cooling
design, and designing power grids as well as the cabinet itself. He
holds 14 U.S. patents and has another four pending. “He’s pretty
much brilliant,” said Dale Eichel, the StorageTek manager to whom
Konshak reports.
But as night falls, Konshak works on
remote-controlled contraptions, usually around 3 feet high but much
wider, with names such as PyRAMidroid, Agitator and Flexy-Flyer.
They compete in showdowns such as ComedyCentral’s “BattleBots,”
TNT’s “Robot Wars,” and The Learning Channel’s “Robotica.”
For those unfamiliar with the emerging sport of robot
combat, “BattleBots” and “Robot Wars” are mechanical freak shows,
pro wrestling with armored robots that don’t fake it.
“Robotica” differs a little in that in addition to
attempting to demolish the opponent with combinations of lawnmower
blades, saws, drills, hammers and claws, robots must quickly
navigate an obstacle course maze of bricks, rollers, spikes and
broken glass.
If not born to bash robots, Konshak’s life
experience has made him a man uniquely positioned to do
so.
For one thing, Konshak plays to win. After repairing
carrier-based F-4 Phantoms during the Vietnam War, Konshak began an
on-and-off passion for dirt-track motorcycle racing. That reached
its zenith in 2000, when he won national amateur championships in
four categories of the Vintage Dirt Track Racers Association despite
breaking his foot early in the season.
VDTRA riders race
brakeless bikes built before 1974 on dirt ovals at speeds of 100
mph. Four such bikes remain in his Louisville house’s original
two-car garage.
But the welding and metalworking equipment
Konshak used to rebuild these Yamahas has moved to a second,
adjacent two-car garage, erected recently enough that Konshak still
posts the building permit on his front door. “I was taking the whole
garage and my wife, Becky, wanted a place to park her Jeep,” he
said.
This structure is now the Robot Dojo, the workshop in
which Konshak creates and houses his combatants.
It all
happened in a year. After collecting enough dirt-track racing
trophies to create a sort of golden skyline, Konshak said he began
looking “for something that I could get into that would be a little
bit safer.” With his racing experience, Konshak thought the answer
was Sports Car Club of America racing.
By last December, Jim
Christian Racing of Boulder had picked Konshak as one of its SCCA
drivers. To prepare for the season, Konshak subscribed to cable TV
to watch Speedvision Network telecasts of SCCA races. A Comedy
Central “BattleBots Marathon” transfixed Konshak on Christmas day.
He began selling off his racing bikes and soon was spending the
proceeds on robot parts.
It was a natural step. Konshak was
expert at Parametric Technologies’ Pro/ENGINEER design software,
which he uses in his work at StorageTek and to design robots. A
licensed ham radio operator, he was a quick study in radio control.
He understood batteries from his experience outfitting his Fairplay
cabin with a photovoltaic system that generates 6,000 watts a day.
StorageTek connections led to a sponsorship by Star
Precision, which bends, cuts and donates sheet metal as per
Konshak’s designs. He owned the welding equipment and had long cut,
shaped and fused 4130 chromemoly tubing to bolster the frames of his
racing bikes.
He also had uncommon drive and energy. “Mike is
one of those guys where you can’t throw enough at him. And if he’s
got spare time, he’s got this tremendous enthusiasm for other
things,” Eichel said.
For much of the past year, Konshak
said he has been either at his StorageTek workstation or in the dojo
until about 2 a.m. and all day on weekends. His vacations have been
either at work designing robots or on the road at one- to two-week
competitions.
He convinced sponsors to donate the electric
wheelchair motors, actuators, solenoids and torque limiters that
make up the key elements of the robots. And like professional car
racers, the robots are adorned with the sponsors’ logos. He has sold
racing bikes to fund the remainder, what he said was $5,000 to
$6,000 out of pocket for each robot, which would cost twice that
figure without his sponsors.
His first competition was the
May “BattleBots,” where Konshak learned that, if TV adds weight to
people, it takes it off robots. The red, white and blue PyRAMidroid
was under-armored and, its 1/8 inch-thick aluminum skin showing
wounds disproportionate to the forces sustained, counted out well
before the TV rounds.
During the summer, Konshak built
Agitator, based on the same six-wheeled, floor-hugging frame as its
predecessor, but with a set of revolving arms with four-pound
splitting mauls welded to each end that spin at an angular velocity
of 40 mph. The bot, which made it through several rounds at the
November “BattleBots,” has deep saw wounds, mangled ties and a badly
bent arm from the car-accident type forces sustained as its
hydraulics were gouged out by a robot named Tripulta
Raptor.
Konshak also created Flexy-Flyer, which competed in
“Robotica” in Hollywood in October. Though Konshak won’t say how he
fared (the show airs Dec. 19 on The Learning Channel), he does have
a conspicuous trophy — not to mention photos of “Robotica” host
Ahmet Zappa shaving Konshak’s head.
You’ll have to watch the
Dec. 19 show to find out why.
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