The Seventh War

'The First War'

When did it all start? Well for us it started with a small advert in 'Sci-fi & Fantasy Model magazine', January 1996. "Robot Wars needs you!". After seeing a little of the American version sometime before, I couldn't resist the challenge and so duly sent off for some info.

It must have been getting on for twelve months before I heard anything more. But eventually a meeting was arranged in Birmingham to come and see what it was all about, and so I took David ( my brother-in-law) along with me. There we met Steve, the producer and Mary-Jane and the crew and saw the only British robot ever to have competed in Robot Wars (USA) at that time ( Wysiwyg).

Well that was it! There was no stopping us and after a lot of work, and numerous filming delays, the first 'Wars' was filmed at Victoria docks in November 1997. There were only 36 robots involved. Some of those had been heavily persuaded to take part and some just weren't ready,( notice Detonator being pulled in on a piece of string.) How did we get on?........ SMOKEY!
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Dave and Ken
The gruesome twosome in a pose for the local 'rag' .

The innards
The workings of mark 1. Note the whopping great switches ( from an electric bus) which were needed to cope with the high current drain of the three car starter motors. As those who are technically minded will know, starter motors are shunt motors and can't easily be reversed. But thanks to some technical expertise we managed to open them up and put in an extra wire off the coil to make the polarity switcheable (not an easy or reliable task). Unforunately we only had one earth cable from the battery to the frame which obviously couldn't cope with the amount of current going through it! The wheels were driven via a chain and sprockets, but weren't really geared down enough, which made it fast (initially) but impossible to control. The night before filming we were wetting ourselves because there was no way we could control the beast and we had visions of looking extremely embarrassed in front of millions of viewers the next day. Fortunately that night we had a eurika moment and decided to fix the two rear swivel castors in a straight line, making it drag steering, (a useful tip for anyone using rear castors.) and at least giving us a chance to control it.

The Body
Burning the midnight oil to try and get the clay body finished in time. I work as a freelance car design sculptor and were able to use many of those techniques to help us build Dreadnaut. The height of the body was governed by the height of the fork motor and the body was designed around this and the wheel/castor positions. The fixings of the body were adjustable to give different ground clearances.

Finished!
After almost working through the night, Dreadnaut is finished in the early hours of the day we were due to take it to London. No time for a test drive, which was a shame as it was impossible to control until we fixed the rear castors. We thought the forks were pretty mean, but they really weren't man enough for the task and bent up when we hit the first obstacle. The shiny nose was fibreglass with aluminium foil spraymounted over it.

Phillipa's Signature We made it through the first round quite impressively, but caused some drama as the motors burned out and started smoking. A lot of our programme was taken up with "would we make it into the next round or not?" and "would 'Plunderbird' take our place?" We made it, just, but had to adapt our fork motor to replace the drive motor. It never really recovered and we didn't get to use the forks in anger. We scraped through the football round on a technicality ( knocking out a young lady who had been sitting in the audience the day before and had been asked to run Wysiwyg (which was owned by one of the judges)because they were short of robots to fill the series!
In the third round we were pushing our opponents towards the pit (we were booed, probably because we were a much bigger robot) when Dreadnaut finally gave up the ghost and started smoking again!

THE WINNER
The winner this year was

Roadblock.

Click here to see their website.