Team Kaizen Build Diary

[Ocracoke]

Jibril and Azriel - Robots Live! Crawley 2021
It was great seeing everyone again after so long. Turned up at the event a little later than I wanted to but we got there with plenty of time to spare to get ready. Also had the pleasure of meeting up with Darryl Fountain at the event (apologies if I got the name wrong). His dad, Brain Fountain, was one half of Team Mace from the original run of Robot Wars.

I am also now convinced I am in someway cursed with Robots Live! events and being utterly mangled at those events.

Saturday
Saturday was a FW only match for me as I wanted to hold on using Jibril until a possible MW only fight the next day. It was also the day that Robots Live debuted their new FW house robot which is a dragon with a clampy claw. The fight started OK but as soon as it got involved in a brawl, Azriel just... stopped dead. That new house robot then proceeded to put me in the mangling thing at the back of the arena which immediately tore off the rear of the robot and pulled out the wiring with it.

I think what happened there was a battery wire was knocked out of a terminal block which caused the whole robot to shutdown.

Sunday
With confirmaton that there was going to be an unofficial Middleweight championship between Backflip, Audacious and Jibril between the two shows, I held back on putting Jibril in for melees with Heavyweights and focused on Azriel. For the second FW melee fight, I asked my friend to drive and while he lasted longer than I did in the first melee, a strike to the lid caused the whole machine, again, to shut off. This time it was a snapped wire from the fuse to the rest of the robot.

The third FW melee I resumed control and this time, whilst Azriel managed to keep going for most of the right until the battery wire popped out again and another motor wire snapped (many thanks to Nat for helping with that, I was rushing to get it sorted), we found that while Azriel cannot self right when the axe is retracted, it can self right when the axe is in the fired position and it retracts back. So that is nice to know. :P

Between the two shows, there was an hour's break and that was when we had our unofficial championship fight. To put it bluntly, Jibril 2.0 preformed very badly. The axe was ponderous and started slipping again despite being held down with a U bolt. By the time it was flipped upside down, the axe simply had no power to self right with. The drive on one side was also not meshing properly and all in all, it was a very poor showing. That rather soured my mood for the 3pm show because all the time and effort put into the robot it simply hadn't worked. The damage was relatively minor otherwise.

Back to the Featherweight fights, the fourth fight Azriel was flipped out of the arena I think with a wheel coming off and the fifth fight, it was flipped up and over but the batteries weren't fully charged and the axe wasn't in the right position so ended up beached.

6 fights, 6 losses. I must admit, I was pretty upset with the performance of both machines. Azriel has major endurance issues and Jibril... well yeah. The 2.1 version of Jibril is going to have a change in the reduction ratio of the Scythe-Axe and the axe carrier rebuilt so that it doesn't move about as much. Azriel I was initially thinking about a complete rebuild to 2.0 but I might just rewire the whole robot, up the ratio to 6:1 on the axe, switch to a 6S LiPo for a bit more oomph and finally use the metal axe that Jamie cut for me a while go.