Three nights before the Great Plains Robot Showdown of 2002, my parents drove me to Matt Fillmore's house. We planned to leave early the next morning for Kansas City. While there, I decided I would make a new antweight to compete with rather than my Battlebots toy hack, MAGPy, which really sucked. I had thought I might do this, so I brought my servos and some erector set things I thought would work well.
Sure enough, we decided to undertake the task. I bought a pair of servos Matt had hacked and some wheels he had from him and began to work. I glued/zip tied the servos onto a strip of metal I had placed on the robot. I then added four panels to create three wedges and a back strip to keep me from flipping easy. Then I wired it up. It worked! I was so excited.
The next day we drove to Kansas City. We stayed with Michael Harry, a local builder. He decided to make an antweight, too. That night, we helped him out as i fixed mine up. I decided to add the foam you see in the picture. This would create a way for me to stop spinners should I come up against them. Then we had some three-way rumbles. I was very happy with my robot's power and wedge design. It was a design that allowed me to spin to get the side wedges underneath opponents and then drop them off the front wedge, sometimes flipping them.
when at the hotel, I worked on all of my robots. This one only undertook one change. I replaced the metal strip holding the servos so that it was invertable. Then I fought Chesney Rathbun's recently finished beetleweight, Cocker. It had a big blade spinning really fast. The first hit stopped the blade with the foam. On the second hit, the blade flew off. then it was a pushy match. Cocker was driven by servos, so it was pretty even. I was ready to go into the real competition!
Move on to GPRS '02. |
