Slightly late post-Champs update
(hey it even rhymes)

Everything considered, I think this championships went really well considering Overdrive was still being finished less than 10 hours before getting in the car to drive up to go to the Gadget Show. Massive thanks to Harry there for firstly putting up with my nonsense and secondly actually building a half decent machine in about 48 hours or so. Even if I did end up breaking it... but we'll get to that later!

Fight 1: Overdrive vs Hatchet vs Satanix 1.666
Loss: 1 point



Well, it worked at least. The disc got up to about 60% throttle in total (wanted to take it easy just in case there were issues) and a pretty nice hit on Hatchet ended up highlighting my dodgy engineering skills. Namely, I hadn't aligned the front panel properly and it sort of came off. The machine itself didn't break, all that went was the weapon belt which I'd not done properly anyway and of course the front plate - I tapped out because the innards of the machine were all exposed as a result of the panel coming off, which included a receiver, two ESCs and a pair of lipos. Not entirely sure I'd like to risk it at that point haha. Still, got a pretty damn nice hit on Hatchet, flipped it over and caused two nice chunks in the front scoop at that!

Fight 2: Overdrive vs Beauty 8 vs Satanix 1.666
2nd - 2 points



Not much to say here really, Beauty 8 flipped Satanix out then Overdrive almost out, but it bounced into the pit. It looks like the hit I get around 9 seconds in or so snapped the weapon motor shaft and that's when it stopped working. It wasn't spinning up to full anyway so there was probably an issue right from the start, but there you go! Also note how slowly Overdrive was well, driving - that's partly due to dodgy mixing on the DX5e, for some reason it was going insanely slow and I remedied this for later fights by just not using any mixing. Potential upgrades include a more powerful drive and an external mixer so shouldn't be a problem in the future.


Fight 3: Banana Overdrive vs Richie vs Twisted Sister
2nd - 2 points



It begins...
At this point in the competition, I was going to just drop out entirely I'll be honest - no working weapon and a drivetrain which wasn't much good for pushing isn't the best recipe. Instead, it gained an inflatable banana (courtesy of Jamie) and it was a real laugh to drive around! In this fight I appear to lose one side of the drive, all that happened is a screw came loose and got caught in the plastic colson hubs, which is what stopped it in the end! Unfortunately when Richie turned the robot over, guess which wheel it ended up on?

Fight 4: Banana Overdrive vs Little Nipper vs Rabid M8
2nd - 2 points



Well this went roughly how you'd expect. Two machines with big spiky claws, one robot with a piece of inflatable fruit in place of a weapon. Got a few holes punched in the lid (Nipper is scary lol) but no major damage. Even if Nipper missed everything important by mere millimetres - I held my speed controllers together with electrical tape and there was a small scuff on the electrical tape where Nipper's claw had been resting on them but didn't have enough depth in the crush to get them... which was rather lucky! Nipper also managed to miss my right hand drive motor by less than a millimetre too... Oh and the banana got swiss cheese'd by the end of it, which must come as a total surprise to everyone haha.

After that, Overdrive didn't go into anymore fights - instead, its electronics were put into Hardwired 2 to run that in whiteboards which on 3s and with new tyres actually ran quite nicely. The motors from that are now going to a new home so I can be inspired/forced to run brushless like I've been saying for literally a year now. Overdrive's maybe getting upgraded to also run actual brushless this time instead of brushless-wait-they-don't-work-I'll-just-use-drills-instead. Oh and 4wd with big beefy rock crawler wheels. I'm thinking of upgrading the latter so I have something to use at next year's championships, then work on the brand new machine, just so I have a fallback!

All in all though, great event - extremely enjoyable as always and I've learned yet more things for upcoming projects which is always a bonus too! Focus for the short term will be on beetleweights (not another featherweight event for presumably another year now) but I'm building early this time, another thing that I've learned is good haha