December 12, 2000

Failure :(

I suppose I'll start by relating our sorry tale from the auditions :(

Yes we failed! ahh ive said it now, we didn't make it onto the show! We rushed and rushed and ran out of time. We turned up at the auditions 12.6 kilos overweight and wearing temporary Armour. Personally I thought we looked Big Pants but that's what you get when you run out of time.

As for the battle well everything worked well including the weapon! In fact it worked so well we bent the main blade like a sine wave on PC Plods tuff Armour. I just never realised the forces involved with 4 tons of hydraulic pressure! So anyway home we went very very disappointed to say the least :(

Now on to the modifications we have had to undertake to achieve a 12.6 kilo weight loss! I also wanted to triple the force on the main blade, which meant going from a 50mm bore ram at 4 tons to an 85mm bore ram at 14 tons. The trouble is this would just add more and more weight especially as we needed to redesign the 2d blade and go for a 3d blade for the much greater extra strength needed!

This is where the Carbon and Kevlar comes in. We basically have replaced the gearboxes, all the motor casings and the body shell with either Carbon, Carbon/Kevlar or just Kevlar. We also, because I felt that we looked to boxy (crap) have chopped 4 inches from the back and also 4 inches out of the roof! this gives us a much sleeker line and a bit more of a classic wedge shape. The Bosch motors have had Ally end plates made and also now sport a carbon central motor tube. The hydraulic pump motor has been to the CNC man for a short back and sides. This now also sports a carbon motor casing. The kart wheels and slicks have been replaced with a machined alloy wheel sporting a Ti tire and then the cut down part of the slicks we had which have been treaded.

The best bit and the hardest to make has been a one piece Carbon/Carbon Kevlar/ Bullet proof Kevlar /Carbon body shell. This is even if I say so a masterpiece of design! It will once in place make the whole chassis very very strong and we are hoping will be impregnable to all but the mightiest of weapons. It also has built into the roof section a row of 20mm led lights in a strip. These are connected to our new pressure transducer. This will be a visible link as to how much pressure in tons we are exerting with the weapon! So we have 10 lights the first one being 0 tons and the last one being 14 tons. Hopefully this will look cool and also enable me to see when we have reached maximum pressure so I can back off and not blow the pump and or motor up.

So that's it for the modifications the good part in all this is that we have plenty of time now to really nail the design. As lets face it this time last year we hadn't even started building the damn thing! So we are well ahead of schedule. As for other news we have become firm friends with our greatest rivals Anthrax so much so that we have each designed and built parts for the others robot. We have built their Carbon sprockets and they are building the electronics link for our LED lights. We also have become Tag team mates so if there is ever a Tag team then it will be Anthrax and Executioner on the same side! quite a formidable team I might add.

OK well that's about it I will start adding pictures to the page over Xmas and now I've got my new laptop I can update the page wherever I might find myself :) Oh yes this Saturday I am hosting a large meet of the top UK teams at Ashton near Peterborough where I live in the UK. This was invite only so if you weren't invited then chat to us more so you can come to the next one :)

Mark...

Posted by Mark at December 12, 2000 4:05 PM

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