BattleBots 3.0 May, 2001

Treasure Island, California, USA

Registration

I entered PyRAMidroid as shown above with the air powered spikes at Battlebots first, but encountered major opposition from the safety crew, as they thought it was too dangerous, Hello? This is combat! They didn't like the idea that when I turned OFF the Master switch, the actuators came shooting out both sides. This was originally deemed to be the safest place to store them when everything was off, so that there would be no surprises. Unfortunately they didn't see it that way, so my wife Becky and I, ripped the pyramid off and replaced it with the PyRAMidroid parts. I later got approval for the pnuematics as they were but I didn't want to switch it around again. It takes about an hour to switch. It was probably for the better as the actuator shaft was 5/8 inch diameter and it was the opinion of most experienced bot builders that it would have bent in the heavy weight class (should have been 1" dia). I just want to mention that everyone at Battlebots did a superb job of getting the over 500 contestants through technical inspection and had the patience of Job when dealing with all of those (us?) prima-donna, know-it-all geeks. Their gears are well oiled to say the least.

Becky says: "You ARE the weakest link...GOODBYE!"

Pyramidroid was very effective in competition and easy to control, but, it had more ramming strength than its skirts could withstand when hitting the walls and they looked terrible when we got done. Getting the opponent on top of us was no problem as long as the skirts stayed flat. The skirts were designed with 1/8" thick aluminum and although they were supposed to be 6061-T6, they were inadvertantly made of softer stuff. I knew I screwed up when I saw that Biohazard uses 1/4" thick Titanium. Oops, bad designer, bad designer! TV just doesn't show the scale of these things very accurately.