Wow…. what a weekend. I (Chris) am exhausted and really need lots and lots more sleep than I’ve had last night.

The weekend didn’t start off too well for us, as we learned we were unable to run the drum on Catch Me If You Can due to an issue with the arena roof.  This led to us missing Saturday show 1 as we frantically worked to remove the motor that drives the weapon and make sure everything worked.  In the process of all of this, the ring terminals that hold nearly all the electrics in place decided to start shedding themselves across the floor of the pits.

Catch Me If You Can before its first fight.

Eventually, we got things back together for the first fight of the second show on Saturday.

A distinct inability to control the 3kW of power available to us in the drive led to us getting shoved (fairly rapidly) down the pit of oblivion by another new robot (Luna-tic – awesome little machine).

We came out of that fight (despite going nose-first into the pit) relatively unscathed…. I was actually quite surprised.  We’d taken some fairly hefty hits, and there were only a few dings and dents on the actual machine.

We stayed fairly late after that show to just get everything tidy and make sure the machine was working.

Sunday morning came and with it an awful night’s sleep catching up with me – I’m convinced it was just nerves/panic setting in – as I headed back to EventCity to do two more shows and hopefully four more battles.

We only managed two of those, due to taking some fairly extensive damage in the lunchtime show (photo left). this left our left gearbox panel decidedly battered and bruised – and our right gearbox panel cracked at the top.  The power lead had jumped out of the fuse, and the receiver wires had jumped out of the receiver.

Nothing major hugely, just something that we need to address going forward with the wiring.

We sustained further damage to our battery boxes (and a slight dent in one of the batteries itself!) in the first fight of the 4PM show, at which point I was starting to run out of spares, and had a flight to catch so decided to call it quits there.

That said, we’ve learned a lot, met a load of friendly faces (including a whole host of people that we’ve previously seen on TV – slightly surreal) and had an absolutely smashing time.

All that really remains for me to say is a massive thank you to (in no particular order):

• John, Trevor, and the awesome Extreme Robots crew
• The roboteers from all the teams in the pits for being such good sports.
• The amazing Manchester audiences over the 4 shows

We’ll be doing it all over again in Portsmouth in two weeks time.  If you don’t have tickets yet – book yours now at http://www.extremerobots.co.uk/live to see your favourite fighting machines battling it our live in a city near you!

We’ll see you next time!