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Robot Mania at Whitehawk


22/9/01Robot Mania at Whitehawk


After the huge rush to get KC2 ready for Wilsons Day, I was too exhausted to get repairs done for Robot wars qualification. I'd been up till about 11 each night, cutting grinding, welding, who knows what the neighbours thought? I'd created a whole pile of extra armour after the Dom2 incident, unfortunately it put us way overweight. The flipper alone weighed in at about 20 kgs. After much "lightning" we were down to just about 100kg, and I thought I'd do a test run. That's when the speed controller went poop! I almost cried.


So After a couple of attempts at repair, with the help of many people on the forum,(thanks, you know who you are!) and in real life from Paul Chitty, a local electronics wizard,I realised I was stuffed. I had the choice of running KC2 on an old pair of NCC35's for the qualifiers, with virtually no armour, or of going on holiday as had originally been planned. After a small bribr to the kids, I spent the week on a beach eating ice cream and looking a pretty women... (my wife).


on return the replacement board still hadn't arrived from 4QD, so instead we stuffed a pair of NCC35 24's in and put our names down for the footie at Ian Watt's Robot Mania, Brighton 22nd Sept
. 2 Teams, Our team(Bigger Brother) versus the others (Panic Attack), very quickly we were down from 5 robots on each team ... to us versus the rest.


We scored, they scored, we scored... then Panic attack blocked us, and they scored again.3-2. As I said a Moral Victory.


Robots were failing left right and centre, we came out with a few scratches, but I have photos of the damage we did to Panic Attack, (sorry), I'll post them soon.


KC2 is now sitting in the shed, awaiting a rebuild, not from any damage, but just to make it small enough to lug through the living room more easily, (like Bigger brother)
We've also lent a speed controller to the dominator 2 boys as they are planning to create a range of products including an interface for 4QD boards.

So until we get the speedie back, KC2 is on ice. We've decided not to bother with techno games this year either, a lot of standing around in a cold shed... we'll miss not seeing Alex, but there you go.

At present, Im working on a rebuild of Diced Carrot, KC1 has been stripped out to remove excess metal, strengthen some welds, and put more of the weight over the wheels to try and stop some of the pendulum effect.
I've changed the regulator too so I can use the Soda stream adaptor that Alan Wood (Onslaught) made for us.

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