31/7/00 - Demoed Tornado to our work colleagues. It was our first run with wet tyres and fully working weapon - however we think there must be a crushed pipe somewhere, as the weapon was less effective than it had been on the bench. We did quite a bit of driving about (clouting a kerb in the process, taking a big chunk out of it and bending a spike) and punting plastic speaker boxes about, and then we had a go at towing my car again (750kg of Fiat Uno). No problems starting, but unfortunately cars don't have regen braking, and robots do... Bryan couldn't stop my car in time and the robot got pulled round the side into the wing - the damage was minor, apart from a completely trashed mudflap, only a bit of bent plastic and metal on the wing which we straighted out there and then. The robot's worth more than my car anyway...

1/8/00 - The day of our audition! We arrived at Park Street Studios a bit early, but already there were lots of robots there and the registration process was in full swing. To be let in we needed to have our robot fully working and ready to go - some teams sat in the car park all day before they were allowed in - and they wanted to check the robot before we took all our tools in (so when you go, take your robot in first!). The technical check came first, Matt Irvine went through looking at Tornado and ticking his checklist - he couldn't find anything wrong! (We later overheard a comment along the lines of "go and look over there to see how it should be done", with 'over there' being us...) We handed our transmitter over to transmitter control, and signed in, getting only a stick on name badge for signing our lives away. Weighing in and a photo came next - we were 78kg - nicely underweight! (Weightwise, an 88kg robot called F-One was allowed to fight - personally we would like to have seen that turned away, but they were beaten anyway. More on tech later.) Next came charging - and our only big hiccup. The connectors Bryan used on the high pressure side are only really low pressure ones, and despite them holding for us at 1000psi, obviously they could not allow us to be fully charged! The only hose connectors that are acceptable for high pressure are the hydralic type sleeved ones, as the hose can't be forced off. CO2 and compressed air was available, so the charging guys agreed to charge us to 250psi with compressed air - better than nothing! We now joined the queue for fights - and started to wait. By this time we were a fair way down the queue, and were up to be first to fight after the interval in the second session, our opponent being "T2 R Special" - a robot entered as Tantrum in series 2 and T2 in series 3; the picture below shows their Series 3 incarnation.

2/8/00 - Bryan investigated the hosing required to uprate the high pressure side of our pneumatics to the full 1000psi pressure. It will cost well over £100, so given the time we have left, we're going to leave it as is.

3/8/00 - Ordered T-Shirts from Bourne Embroidery. Brought Tornado into work again to show those who didn't see it the first time. Despite the wet weather (and resultant lack of grip), we pulled Bryans Land Rover up the car park and back, and then proceeded to destroy a pallet and a speaker box. We now have some cleaning to do though... Got a call from Mentorn - we have been selected for the filming and are needed on the 8th from 8am....

4/8/00 - Refitted the pneumatics tanks, cleaned the armour, repaired the fixed spike I dented on the kerb at work, and rehardened the pneumatic ram spikes. Dave built a killswitch into the transmitter, so that we can turn the transmitter on first and Tornado will not lurch on power up.

6/8/00 - Found out today that Dantomkia did not make it through its audition, despite winning both its battles. We feel that this is not on; the audition places were supposed to be qualifying places, but it looks like most were discretionary and chosen by the producer. Given the number of technical infringements we saw at our audition, we feel that much stricter technical checks would allow Mentorn to reduce the number of entrants, and in a fairer way.

7/8/00 - T-Shirts arrived from Bourne Embroidery - they are excellent. Prepared all our junk ready for the filming in the evening, and built up the spare wheels with wet tyres.

8/8/00 - The day our heat was filmed!. (See Tornado on TV.) The arrangements were much the same as before, although we were required to turn up at 8am rather than 9 this time. We weighed in at 78.2kg (we forgot to weight the link at the auditions!). Our heat (programme) was with Gemini (seeded 8th), Katerkiller, Invertibrat, Beserk 2 (seeded 26th) and Beast. Gemini is the first UK Robot Wars cluster bot (of hopefully many in the future) - they were brilliant, with flippers on both almost as good as Chaos 2's! The format has changed from last year, with the heats starting with a 3 team Melee. Our first fight was against Gemini and Katerkiller - Katerkiller provided us with the least threat, so we went straight for them, pushing them into the CPZ's, into the arena side, and into Refbot (who wobbled precariously). Gemini spotted this and helped us flip them, and so we both left Katerkiller to Killalot (who bent both their rams) and Dead Metal (who put a big sawcut in their rear). Meanwhile, Gemini and us proceeded to have some fun - with the house robots! Shunt we managed to push sideways quite easily (but not when we tried in his normal direction of travel). He got rather cheesed at us and put a big hole in our top armour... Gemini proceeded to flip us, and then Shunt put another hole in our underside... I then drove into the pit, which was just decending - they raised it again and we got out (Gemini tried to flip us out), Gemini flipped us again, and we started to have radio problems due to a rather knackkered aerial! They dropped the pit fully, and just as cease was called, I drove down it again... But Katerkiller was very much immobilised beforehand, so both Gemini and us were through... Our second fight was against Beserk 2, who were much slower than us, and had GRP bodywork and thin aluminium rear armour... They managed to get their axe working once or twice, but didn't hit us, and they caught us once with their flipper, but we broke free. Otherwise we just got onto their sides and pushed... Lots of squealing tyres gave them a puncture, and we just pushed them to the arena wall and rammed them, er, repeatedly... Killalot came in and finshed them off, dropping them in the pit. We did a quick victory spin - and dropped a chain! Fortunately we could still keep moving enough to show the judges we were not immobilised. We put lots of holes in their GRP bodywork and aluminium rear armour - they'll be back next year with more power! Fixing the chain itself was not too much of a problem - but we found a big one - part of our drivetrain uses a bearing to keep the chain tensioned, and it was bent about 20 degrees, allowing the chain to go slack and hence jump off. This is a big problem and will need a permanent solution - fortunately we have the weight left to do it. Beast was spectacularly disposed of by Gemini - firstly their shell (and removable link) were flipped off, then they were completely somersaulted, and then they were thrown out of the ring! Our last battle was to be against Gemini - Invertibrat had a malfunction in the Melee and were knocked out. Given their performance against Beast we were rather worried... However, we knew the rules as well as they did, and as such we knew we had to knock only one of them out to win. We could push them around easily, but they could flip us without too much effort, and they had two robots... It was difficult, but we were incredibly lucky to force one of them onto an arena spike and knock the power leads off their batteries. We had won - but the other Gemini was not finished! We kept getting flipped, then we dropped a chain, and we got flipped even more, and finally we lost all power. No failsafe light, no power supply lights, but also no smoke or blown fuses. But we had won our heat/programme, and we were through to the semis!
We also found out that one of our major worries was already out - Razer had malfunctioned, and had been utterly wrecked by Pussycat (a spinning disc robot). Three other heats were filmed that day, and were won by Dominator II, Thermidor, and the Wheely Big Cheese (in a highly controversial judges decision where Suicidal Tendencies blatantly won the fight). Our support crew were there - Chris, Anna, James and Will, plus my parents, Bryans parents, Carl, and Adrian - thanks for cheering us on guys!
It was a great day, and the standard of robots seemed much better than we were expecting - hence the decision to exclude Dantomkia may have been at least partially justified, although we are still fairly sure that they could have made at least the second round... Also everything there had a weapon, and Dantomkia doesn't, which also could have counted against them. Tech wise it was much better: anything over 80kg was being turned away (as far as we could see), and dodgy pneumatic systems were being properly treated (they would only charge us to 150psi this time). A few things to note for those of you going: Food is provided, and good. All three meals are laid on (go find breakfast when you get there), but the evening meal can be very late (we left long before it was served). Although they are working to a schedule, you do get time to fix problems, but you will be stalled by filming going on nearby! Be prepared to do more than one take of the chatty bits... Dave's apparent enthusiasm was in inverse proportion to the number of times he was asked about storm chasing... The crew are very helpful (MJ, Alex et al), and if there is a problem they will try and sort it out, even though they are very busy! And there were even more gorgeous women about than at the auditions... so if you still need a reason to do Robot Wars...

9/8/00 - Bought some more paint for the repair work after our heat. As we stripped the robot, Dave tested the electronics - the reason we lost power at the end of our fight with Gemini, was that we broke a battery! When we were axed by Shunt in the first round, one of our Hawkers gained a slight dent, which we thought nothing of, but upon closer inspection now it was crucial... With all the flipping Gemini did, our batteries moved around a bit, and one of the solid connection bars levered the battery terminal that Shunts axe had previously hit and broke it! We are replacing the bars with cable now... You can see the tiny dent in our battery protection plate, the dent in the top of the hawker, and you can just make out a dark line in the black resin where it is cracked.

10/8/00 - Got a call from Mary Jane - they want us to appear in the Daily Mail Weekend magazine! Cut the damaged bearing mounts out of the chassis and replaced them with much thicker and stronger box section. Also reinforced and rehardened the rear spikes, and repaired the ding in the underside of the chassis caused by Shunts axe. Dave repaired the broken jack connector screw and checked the electronics - everything is OK.

11/8/00 - Ground down the welding done yesterday and repainted the chassis.

12/8/00 - Rebuilt the robot and packed our things for the semis tomorrow...

13/8/00 - Semi-Finals and Finals Day! We were starting to get used to the arrangements by now... Our first battle was to be against the 15th seed Wheely Big Cheese. Pretty much all of the crew were on our side, given how contentious the decision in their last fight against Suicidal Tendencies was - but we won the battle fair and square. We spotted very quickly that their weakness was in their wheels, so we kept going for them, damaging one enough that when they reversed into the arena side, it broke convincingly... we dropped a chain however (yet again), jamming one side of our drivetrain and stalling a motor... which we burnt out very thoroughly!

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