The big day finally arrives!
Anyone recognise the red-haired bloke with the coffee cup?
We arrive at Newark at 10:30 am - still
exhausted from the night before.....
Max weighs in at 97kg...a comfortable margin beneath the
100 kg limit
Well, at least Karl is still smiling...
all bright eyed and bushy tailed.....
how does he do it?
Not to be outdone, Andrew makes his best attempt yet at a
grin....4/10!
The House Robots were in attendance, fresh out of their crates....
....but they wouldn't be in the arena during the initial qualifying rounds.
Voted the best dressed team in the whole building.....
.....by us anyway!
And Max had to get in on the act too, in an attempt to calm his
nerves.
Karl - still smiling, despite the fact that at 4:30, we were
still waiting to go into the arena!
The scrutineering was painful......!
Several facts came to light that had not been in the Robot Wars paperwork.
Among them was the fact that the removable (safety) links needed to be
re-fitted with one hand inside the shell whilst reaching over an 18 inch barrier
from a foot away only seconds before Max drives into the arena.
With the safety links re-jigged, two additional holes drilled
in the shell to allow access to
a re-sited transmitter switch and an in-house purchased FS-1 radio failsafe
(our FS-2 didn't meet with a great deal of enthusiasm) later...
we were finally allowed to queue for the arena.
Anybody recognise this scrutineer? Seen
him somewhere before, I'm sure of it....
(George Francis has a final word to us about our Robot.)
Note the new access hole on the Robots' side panel!
And the opponents are..........
......IRON-AWE, SON OF AXE-AWE an
aluminium shelled Robot
with a nasty pointy axe at the back.....A Quick machine!
........DESTRUCTABUBBLE - steel chassis
with fibreglass 'bubble'
and a 360 degree stainless steel swinging arm.....Tougher than it looks
.....and DANTOMIKA, a steel shelled Robot
with polycarbonate trimming.
This machine has several years of experience, including American Robot Wars
Watch out for this one on TV!
Unfortunately, all of the pictures taken
during the Battle which followed came out badly.
The protective screening which runs around the arena caused the camera to focus
on the transparent Polycarbonate and so all the photographs were blurred.
So, by way of compensation, we will try to show the battle in a different way (never before seen).
The ignominious aftermath...Maximus inverted, and Destructabubbles torn 'skirt'
Max was turned back
over onto his wheels, and the hard landing helped to straighten
his deformed nose cone. He was loaded onto a trolley and returned to
the pits where he was examined.
There appeared to be surprisingly little damage to either shell or chassis.
The nose cone had bent because there had only been three small tags welded
to to upper edge, and the lower section was tack welded
(It had only been constructed the day before after all).
The upper tags sheared off, and the tacks acted as hinges.
Aside from that it was unharmed, and was easily bent
back into position - just in time to go home!
As a footnote, it
was later discovered that, despite being immobilised first,
Iron-Awe still qualified for the Sixth Wars, and appeared on BBC2 in November.
Strange but true!
Here endeth this page
