TORNADO - The Team with the Comedy Flying Cow
SPINNING DOWN

CLICK ON THE THUMBNAILS TO VIEW A LARGER IMAGE


| Back to previous entry - Series 7 |

4/4/04 - Delivered Tornado to Lakeside, for a weeks static display with Steve Merill.

9/4/04 - Attended Lakeside to run Tornado, alongside the schools robots.

10-11/4/04 - Took Tornado along to the Debenham Robot Rumble event, back at its original home in the Debenham Leisure centre. Borrowed nicads from Storm to test them in Tornado.

1-3/5/04 - Attended the Welsh Robot Challenge in Denbigh. Our first three day event! It was good fun but very tiring...

30/5/04 - Tornado appeared at the Folkestone "Give It Large" event at the Leas Cliff Hall. Tornado took a lot of damage whilst fighting the new improved Terrorhurtz, and this was with John Reid's axe turned down to minimum... This set us thinking; given the standard of other machines, Tornado is starting to become uncompetitive. This will have implications for the World Championships later in the year!

6/6/04 - Took Tornado to the Cambridge County Show. Had a stand selling Robot Wars toys, with Tornado on static display.

19-20/6/04 - Attended the Newark Kit Car Show with Tornado. Didn't run the robot that often, as there was so much to look at on all the trade stands, and the damage from Folkestone meant it was not running well anyway.

27/6/04 - Displayed Tornado on the Battery Vehicle Society stand at the Bromley Vehicle Pageant.

4/7/04 - Sawtry infants school Summer Fete. Displayed Tornado and performed a car tow on the playground.

25-30/7/04 - Tornado was on static display at a shopping centre in Grays with Steve Merrill.

4/8/04 - Bad news regarding the FRA World Champs - Challenge (the TV channel due to film the competition) have pulled out. The event is still due to go ahead however.

7/8/04 - Begun preparations for FRA World Champs. Tornado needs some serious work on its chassis after the damage taken at Folkestone earlier in the year. Given the change in rules (reversing Mentorn's Series 7 active weapons requirement) we have abandonded the chain flail and will repair the scoop, but otherwise our choice of available weapons will remain the same as for Series 7. We have pretty much decided as a team that this filming will be the last major championship that Tornado will compete in; given the continually rising standards we do not expect to do as well in this competition as we have done before, and we would rather have a working machine to take to charity events and school fundraisers than a pile of mangled bits! We're not in a position to invest heavily in a brand new machine either - we reckon you need to spend about £10k to be competitive now...

19/8/04 - A major blow - we found out today that due to poor ticket sales, the FRA World Championships has had to be cancelled. This is bad news not just for us but for the sport in general... We suspended work on Tornado to give us all a break for a while, our preparations were about 95% complete by this point, but some essential work on the chain tensioners was not finished, meaning Tornado is not in a running condition.

11/9/04 - Paid a brief incognito visit to the Wicksteed Park Roaming Robots event - Dave had been called upon to fix Storm's speed controller, which had developed an interference problem. Tornado is still not in running condition...

| Forward to next entry - After TV |