Motorama 2023 Event Write-Up

Fight Videos

All of Gimli’s fights can be found here.
However, I won’t be doing a recap video on Púca and Son of Kram. They didn’t do too well and I don’t have the time. But I will cover what happened in their fights in this write-up.

Gimli

So the first day of Motorama is just Fairyweights and Antweights. So I only had to worry about my 150g Gimli. I actually won Moto last year with the same robot, so it’s time to defend my title!

Gimli VS Flapjack

Flapjack is a servo lifter built by the Silent Stopper team. As the match began, the first thing I noticed was that Gimli is very…slow. I’m so used to the blazing zippiness of SOK and Puca that Gimli felt like I was driving through mud. The #1 thing to upgrade for next time will be the drive motors.

Flapjack was doing a good job of winning the ground game. But half of the time we were just about even and would lock horns. I was landing little hits here and there, but nothing major. Finally, I got 1 big POP that sent Flapjack to the ceiling. After that, both his weapon and drive stopped working. Gimli wins its first match by KO!

Damage to Flapjack by Gimli:

Gimli VS Sir Clips

Sir Clips is a lifter built by Craig Danby! The builder of several well-known heavyweights like Foxic and Slammo. After a series of explosive hits, we found ourselves in a double-knockout situation. Since we were both KO’d at the same time, the official paused the match to reset both of us. However, during this time Craig’s radio battery suddenly died. Because of this, Sir Clips was unable to move and tapped out. An unusual and unfortunate way to win, but ayyy we take those.

The reason Gimli wasn’t able to self-right was because of the glob of hot glue I use to keep the center wires from drifting into the weapon blade (No longer visible in the photo). The glue had come lose during the match and jammed the weapon. Luckily I didn’t slice through my power wires and was still able to drive and take the win.

Gimli VS Combustion

Combustion is a vertical spinner similar to Gimli. In fact its black color scheme made it difficult to tell which bot was which as some points during the match. This was a great back and forth with both of landing some massive hits on each other sending us flying across the arena. Combustion was much faster than Gimli, and it really hammered home the point that I need to speed up my robot in the next version.

Combustion was also winning the ground game in most of these exchanges too, so it wasn’t looking good for Gimli. He even landed a big hit on my wedge, bending it upward and making it almost useless. However, towards the end of the match I was able to land one big hit that shattered his weapon upright, completely breaking his weapon. After this, he tapped out and Gimli moved on to the finals!

Lots of damage to Gimli via Combustion. He bent up my wedge and shattered my top panels! Luckily I was able to bend/hammer the wedge back into shape and had spare tops. One new thing I did with this robot was that I boiled my nylon chassis. In the image below, you can see the difference boiling made as the chassis itself was boiled, but the top plates were not.

Gimli VS Combustion 2

So Combustion ended up making its way through the losers bracket to fight me again in the finals. I was feeling confident though, all I had to do was go weapon to weapon again and hope that his upright would fail like in the previous fight.

This time the match went a little longer. We were both sending each other across the arena and tumbling all over the arena floor. Both of these robots were super durable. But finally, it happened again and Combustion’s weapon upright snapped off. Gimli won the match and thus takes the Fairyweight championship spot for the second year in a row!

Púca

Alright. Puca has been cleaned up from winning the NHRL New Robot event and is ready to destroy the Motorama bracket and definitely not just go 0-1 :’)

Púca VS Real Genius

Real Genius is a vertical spinner with very large, very red foam wheels. As the match began, I revved up my weapon and began to shred the giant wheels to pieces. However, the latex (or at least I think it’s latex) coating immediately got peeled off of his wheels and sucked up into my weapon and one of my drive sides. With my weapon and drive no entangled, I was a sitting duck.

I continued to limp around the arena for nearly half the match, then the official paused the match to address the entanglement. I didn’t ask them to pause the match or anything, so I’m not sure why they waited until a minute and a half had passed before pausing. But I wasn’t going to question it 😛

Here is Púca after most of the latex was removed.

At this point, the official said that since this definitely qualified as entanglement, I could have Evil Genius disqualified. I didn’t want to be “that” guy though and told him we could continue fighting as is. He obviously didn’t mean for his wheels to become an entanglement device. He also sniped my weapon belt, which gives his win some more merit. Would that have happened if my drive wasn’t entangled? We’ll never know 😛 But it was, so it doesn’t matter. We then resumed the second half of the match. I kinda just limped around and tried to slam my non-functional drum into his weapon in hopes that something might break. Instead, he was easily able to get around me and land a nice juicy hit in the back of my robot, damaging my 4-in-1 ESC. At that point my bot was unresponsive, so I tapped.

After taking Púca back to the pits, I noticed that one of my drive motors was also damaged from the hit. After swapping out a new motor, I powered it up and the motor started to smoke. It got insanely hot and smoke began to gush out of it. I tried another motor, and the same thing happened…SMOKE. So the 4-in-1 seemed to be damaged to the point where it would just destroy any motor I hooked up to that channel. The problem now, is that I didn’t have time to get everything fixed and reflash a new ESC in just 20min. So I ended up having to drop Púca for the rest of the event.

Quite the transition from winning an entire championship to going 0-1, but it be like that sometimes. I’ll probably bring Púca to the RCE Finals where it’ll have another chance to fight at a big event.

Son of Kram

Kram is ready to rock and roll with a few changes. The first is that I removed the thrust bearings on either side of the drum as they would just shatter on big hits. So now the drum just rubs against the slippery HDPE walls.

Another change I made was replacing the TPU weapon pulley with a boiled nylon one.

Son of Kram VS Pramheda

Oh hey! I’ve fought this robot before. Even though I beat him last time, it’s still a fantastic robot that should never be underestimated. This was apparent as the match began and we began to bully me with hit after hit.

He lands a massive blow that actually bent my 5/8″ shaft. Then after that, he barely taps me and my entire robot just shuts off entirely. After the match, I took the robot back to the pits, took off the lid, and power cycled it. Everything worked just fine. I’m not really sure what caused the total system failure. My initial thought was that my receiver was acting up again. I’ve had issues with the FS-ia6 receivers after big hits in the past. Others have suggested that since my switch doesn’t have an anti-spark on it any more, there might be some crud built up inside of it and there wasn’t enough contact to keep everything on.

Son of Kram VS Hooligan

Hooligan was winning basically every weapon to weapon exchange. Eventually he lands a huge hit that completely shattered my new nylon pulley. I’m certain the TPU one would have survived, so I’ll be switching back to TPU if I decide to stick with a 3d printed pulley next time. Anyway, as the match goes on, Hooligan’s weapon also fails. The fight is now a big pushing match. Hooligan had a slight traction advantage, allowing them to shove me all around the box. In the last few seconds, a drive side failed on Hooligan and it went to the judges. They decided that Hooligan’s downed drive side wasn’t enough to turn the tides in my favor and the win went to Hooligan.