July 2003

Sunday 6^th July 2003

I cut out all the different panels from the propylene sheets that I needed to armour the Hog with. It took a surprisingly long time to cut them out and then make mounting lugs with which to screw them to the body with. By the end of the weekend I had completed five panels, but had another nine to do! I was going to take part in a charity robot event next weekend at Campion school in Northampton, but wasn't sure now if I would have all the armour completed. It looks like I will have to burn the midnight oil a bit this week if I want to finish the armour on time!

Sunday 13th July 2003

I made it to Campions school's charity event with the Hog fully armoured, but not painted. It looked a bit like a snow ball rather that a Hog. I had spent quite a few late nights during the week making mounting lugs to screw the armour to. At first sight you don't think there will be too many lugs to make, but when you start counting them up, it turns out there are more that 50 to make, and if each takes 10 minutes, that works out to be a lot of hours!

Because of the type of arena that Roaming Robots were using at Campions, we were not allowed to use spinning of pneumatic weapons, so the events we took part in were more like Technogame challenges. E.g slalom course, ten pin bowling, etc. However, right at the end of the day they decided that there would be a free-for-all in the arena. This was the only time I made contact with any of the other robots, and for this pleasure I received a few battles scares but nothing too serious. It was a bit of a shame not to have been able to try the flipper out on another robot, and Killer carrot II felt the same way too about not being able to test his new flipper. All in all though the say was good, the weather was scorching hot, and it was a useful time exchanging tips with the other roboteers, which included, Killer Carrot, Revolution, Bulldog Breed, Mute, Terrogator, Kan Opener, Mighty Mouse, and Savage toaster.

Sunday 20th July 2003

I stripped the Hog right back to its bare essentials so that I could paint the chassis. It took about two hours to strip everything out, but it did make the process of painting the metalwork a lot easier. I gave it one coat of rusteaster primer, followed by two coats of a lovely pink Dulux gloss paint!